The Home Front War

Remember October 7, 2001?

It’s a date that should live in infamy, but probably doesn’t for most of us.  It’s the date the war in Afghanistan started—and it’s still going on, over a decade and a half later.  Early on, the United States dropped a huge bomb on a cave complex where Osama Bin Laden was thought to be hiding.  The other day the United States dropped an even huger bomb on a cave complex where ISIS is believed to have been hiding. Plus change, plus c’est meme chose.

Operation Enduring Freedom.  I’m not sure about the “freedom” part, but the “enduring” is right on.

Now that’s not yet up there with some of the other wars in Western history, like the Hundred Years’ War or even the Thirty Years’ War, but it’s getting there.  And its twin, Operation Iraqi Freedom, drags on as well, with a spillover into neighboring Syria.  But it’s far, far longer than any of the previous American wars (except maybe the Indian Wars of the 19^th Century).  It’s lasted so long that it’s become the norm.  And you have to wonder what that’s done to us, the ones who ignore it at home.

Without legal justification or any stated objective, we fire missiles into Syria, a country we’re not even (supposedly) at war with.  We drop the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on Afghanistan and refer to it, with a disturbing overtone of pride, as the “Mother Of All Bombs” (the phrase itself a nod to the beginning of the Iraq War.)  A few people take to the streets in protest, but soon go back home.  And we dutifully make our comments on Facebook and Twitter, and the people who already agree with us like them.  But increasingly we passively accept the firing of the missiles and the dispatch of carrier battle groups by the President without Congressional authorization or the slightest nod to the Constitution.  We’re a nation permanently at war, and we increasingly seem to be okay with that.

What has it done to us?  To be desensitized would be bad enough—but have the effects gone even deeper?

For over a decade and a half, we’ve sent our young people into an environment where the enemy wears no uniform, where the good guys and the bad guys speak the same languages and, from day to day, can become interchangeable.  An environment in which the ground underfoot may conceal an IED, where every building may conceal a sniper, where every car could be a bomb. An environment in which paranoia is a valuable survival tool, and suspicion of others a necessity.

And when they come back home, does that all spread to the rest of us?  Has their war environment become the home front environment as well?

All of the above was true of Vietnam too, and I vividly remember the bitter divisions between us that war brought, divisions that tore apart families split us into warring tribes and created a cultural bitterness that persists into the present.  But it seemed so much more apparent at that time; we knew it was happening.  Now it just feels like an inchoate simmering anger.  Maybe the real war started fifty years ago, and we’ve just become so used to it that we hardly notice any longer.

Can we survive decades of war?