What we talk about when we talk about war

My maternal grandfather rarely talked about the war. He was sent out soon after he had married my grandmother. They had just turned nineteen. The years many of us spend getting an education and having fun while at it he spent fighting WW2. He came back a decorated hero who never took out those medals and seldom talked about how he’d earned them. On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II a local historian/documentarist wanted to interview him. Even fifty years was not time and distance enough. He declined. By then I could hear what he couldn’t voice; he had seen and experienced more than most of us could handle without losing our sanity.

Strategy, tactics and targets. Strikes, counterstrikes, combat. Invasion and occupation. Soldiers and civilians. Casualties and collateral damage. Valor, heroes, sacrifice. This is the clinical dialect of the language of violence. Devoid of human emotion and the atrocious cost of war. The euphemisms we use, talking in numbers and abstracts, creates the distance we need. It eases the conscience and helps silence objections. We have no choice. This is the price we have to pay.

That choice has consequences, and the price is brutal. Death, carnage, bodies, graves, amputations, disability, pain, fear, fury, terror, shock, trauma, retribution, grief, displacement, squalor. These words should climb to the top of the lexicon. They should fuel our resistance by highlighting the true meaning of war. These are the words I think of when I think of my grandfather’s experience. These are the words I think of when I think about the very real chance that my sons will one day have to go against the madman in Moscow. No mother wants to contemplate that. Not this one. Not a single one.