My ambivalent feeling toward military personnel and veterans is starting to become clear. In the cover article of Atlantic magazine for January-February is The Tragedy of the American Military the author, James Fallows, says of the present American attitude toward the military “We love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them.” We do not know what they eat or how they are trained as ‘killing machines.’ In the movie “American Sniper” the wife tells her husband, the war hero, upon his return from his final deployment in war “I need for you to be human again.” Everyone loves, praises and supports our troops but “Those matters of humanity are not things we tend to talk about when we pin polyester ribbons to our lapels.” ( American Sniper Makes a Case Against ‘Support Our Troops’ by Megan Garber.Atlantic Magazine.January 16, 2015)]])

This attitude of support our troops but do not think about them and what they are doing might explain the lack of response to our YouTube video Marquette and Notre Dame Universities Teach War and Killing. The message is clear but hard to hear so people on both sides of military training in Catholic Universities ignore it. The YouTube video has only a few comments by viewers but one by a veteran says it all: “I graduated from a Catholic university, (Dayton) and from its ROTC program. I was an Army officer for 20 years as a combat arms officer. I fought in most of the wars the US fought in the years during this time. I was wrong and was not obedient to the teachings of Jesus, Son of the living God, and risen. The Justified violence supporters cannot make an argument that follows the teachings of Jesus or the apostles in the NT.” It took a veteran to clearly get the message to these two Catholic Universities.

As many were, I was against the US war in Iraq before it started. One of the early Wisconsin causalities of the Iraqi war was a young man that had been in high school when I was a youth minister at a church in the Milwaukee suburbs. He was one of those kids you had to like, funny and witty. He had a bright future but when I heard he has been killed in Iraq I went to his funeral. I was bothered by the military trappings of his funeral mass and after the liturgy when the doors were open to hear and see the traditional gun salute, I was upset. The government had sent this young man to a war that was supposed to be “preemptive” but turned out to be the first of the “endless wars” we now live with. He has been sent “to kill or be killed” as were soldiers in Vietnam and soldiers in Afghanistan, still in Iraq and elsewhere are being sent. People give pious reason for the killing like “they fought for our freedom” and “gave their life for our liberty and peace.”

So soldiers come and go. We call them heroes and defenders of freedom without really know what they do and how it matters to our lives. We do not want to know these men and women and what they do. We rather know more about our football heroes as they prepare for Sunday’s Championship games. “We love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them.”

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