Guest Commentary: What is War?
I”m confused. I keep reading that Afghanistan is now our country”s longest war.
But I recall that all of my Lake County history teachers and California textbooks referred to U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam as “conflicts” and not as “wars.”
We learned that the Constitution says that only Congress has the right to declare war.
I was sure that there were only a few declared wars, so I called my dad, who is my go-to guy on such issues.
Most of my dad”s undergraduate education was at the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York.
He was expelled three months before his West Point graduation ceremony and Army Officer”s commission. Long story.
Paraphrasing my dad: Sure, there were only a few actual “declared wars,” but, there have been more than 200 military actions where the bullets flew.
Most of them were ordered by the Commander in Chief, i.e., e.g., or whatever, the President.
The Congress gave its authorization and paid for the fight. Of course, everyone knows that Congress controls the taxpayers” purse strings.
Yeah, dad. Does everyone know that?
He said Congress authorized Iraq and Afghanistan, so it”s misguided to call them Bush”s or Obama”s wars.
He went on to say that the most famous or infamous, example was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which was probably based on a lie.
Congress gave President Johnson, then Nixon, a carte-blanche credit card to contain communism in Vietnam. But then Vietnam might have only been a Civil War. It”s still a tough call.
He said, “My West Point classmates, lieutenants fresh out of the academy, went into that Grenada operation in 1982. Now, I”ve lost two friends, LTC Dominic Baragona and Col. Brian Allgood in Iraq. Brian married another one of my West Point classmates, Jane Meek, who retired as a colonel, also. She was part of the third group of female graduates. Jane and I dated for a while, disco-danced, during our Plebe Year in 1979.”
It”s hard to stop him when he starts talking about his West Point classmates.
He said, “I played rugby and partied with BG Bill Mayville, the first of “The Select Few 82″ to get his General”s Star. Bill was General McChrystal”s Chief of Operations before Obama sacked him. Pete Mansour was General Patreaus” Executive Officer. I knew Pete. He was another California boy from Sacramento.”
I had to derail him. I said, “Yeah dad but what about Afghanistan being the longest war?”
“I don”t think so,” he said. “That distinction, if we want to call it that, goes to Korea. You know, where Truman fired MacArthur? Actually, Korea was not just the U.S. A. It was ordered by the United Nations, like Libya, now. We still have more than 20,000 troops stationed there at the DMZ along the 38th parallel. At the height of the Cold War, during the 1980s, 30 frickin” years after Korea ended, we still had more than 100,000 troops stationed there. My West Point rugby buddy, Phil Rymiszewski, spent a year there.” (I had to stop him to get that spelling)
Then he said, “As a matter of fact, Case, the Korean Conflict isn”t even over. The two sides simply signed a cease fire at Panmunjom in 1953. A truce! That”s it.”
“And something else,” he said. “I learned at West Point that Korea is often referred to as the Forgotten Conflict. But, we lost almost as many soldiers there, in three years, as we lost in 10 years in Vietnam.”
“We grieve over all lost lives in defense of our country. But, no. To answer your question, Afghanistan is not our longest war. It”s not even a war, per se. It”s a conflict, as we have called our 200-plus other such actions. And again, that ongoing title goes to Korea.”
Contact Casey in Soda Bay at nunes_23@hotmail.com.
