Today, Memorial Day, Pat and I went with our son and his family to a Milwaukee Brewers Baseball game. Three or four times during the game veterans were honored. This is something, honoring veterans, I have no problem with. But I felt by words and music veterans were not being honored but war was. I doubt if veterans of Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan died so we can be free or enjoy democracy. They were sent to wars where there was no victory for democracy but were placed in an environment where they had to “kill or be killed.” The “war on terrorism”, latest wars, have not eliminated terrorism but created many more terrorist. If we had taken a ‘police action’ against the alleged terrorist for 9/11 that would have been one thing. But we went to war with Iraq, a country devastated and full of violence, after we withdrew. The many years of the war in Afghanistan has not brought peace but more death and injury to all, especially people of Afghanistan.

Where was the Memorial to the 22 veterans a day who commit suicide because of the wars they were exposed to? We talk little about the wounded and more about the dead who cannot respond. Soldiers are brave and courageous persons and should be honored but no one wants to mention the greatest of all tragedies: they did not die protecting our rights but creating more war, violence and terrorist. There were even remembrances of veterans of the civil war where US citizens killed each other.

Father Charles McCarthy sent me a YouTube video call Pieta: Mothers of Sorrow, a Lamentation of the Great Deceit: Just War Theory. It shows the terrible effects of the wars we justify and glorify using the death of soldiers.

Yes soldiers and veterans are brave and courageous but let us honor them without honoring the wars, some “unjust, immoral and illegal”. Let us not use death of military personnel and wounded soldiers to justify war and violence. To say that soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan fought for our freedom and democracy dishonors not honors these brave men and women who did what they thought was right and were trained to do. Honor veterans not war, violence and destruction.

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