Some thoughts, a decade after 9/11

I had occasion to go to a commemoration of the attacks on September 11, 2001 at my children's school. I realize I look at patriotism a little differently than many other I know.

Being there around lots of children reminds me of why I feel uncomfortable around them; they still have their innocence, something I lost a long, long time ago.

I was a company commander the day of the attacks. I told my troops to get ready to go, because it might happen. I also told them to squelch any rumors and I would tell them what I knew as soon as I found out. I kept to that promise, and while my cavalry troop didn't deploy under my watch, it did a year after I turned the troop over to my successor.

The students sang three of the verses of the national anthem, omitting the one perhaps most important to me as a servant of the Republic:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footstep's pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

For a variety of reasons, the children don't sing that verse. I suspect because we don't want to share the fact that sometimes, however unpleasant, we must kill the enemies of the state to defend the people who live in it. The other might be that we don't want to dust off discussions of indentured servitude or worse still, slavery with our children. Better they be high schoolers before we really start digging into the bucket of poo and start slinging some of the really unpleasant truth about the origins of the United States.

The other thing about being around children, certainly those who still have their innocence, is that I don't want them to get the same view of purpose that I hold. I don't want my children to inherit my belief of "dear lord, make me an instrument of your vengeance." But as I boil down what I used to describe to my former students as the "Hannah Montana Theory of Victory in the Long War," I will freely advocate an ethnocidal war of annihilation using mostly nonlethal means. My preferred weapons include portable energy generation, delivery of essential services, the internet, and satellite TV.

I say mostly nonlethal means. The ones who don't want to embrace modernity and can't accept peaceful coexistence...well, I'd be perfectly happy to kill every last one of those motherfuckers. While I'm out of the Close Combat Industry by choice, I realize that there was some dark satisfaction to some of the plans I wrote years ago; reports that insurgents were going hungry and were cold and didn't have shelter because coalition forces were taking it to them in the middle of the winter brought me some dark glee. The insurgency was acting at odds to what we were seeking to accomplish, so I hope those assholes fucking froze to death. I have no regrets and no compunctions. None.

That's why I don't like bowdlerized patriotism. Sometimes you have to do terrible things because the alternative is worse, and freedom usually costs more than $1.05, for those who have seen the film Team America: World Police.

As Thomas Paine said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

Postscript: I realized the other thing that really just gets me on the fucking rag -- it's the "under god" part of the Pledge of Allegiance. I'll say it, but not those two words. Oh well. At least my dog tags say ATHEIST on the religious preference line, so I don't have any pretenses either way.

The war continues. In the meantime, I have a new bottle of Bulleit 95 Rye Whiskey. It's time for some goddamn catharsis drinking tonight.