WAR/PEACE

War is hell but its remembrance is about heroes.

"Generally war is destruction and nothing else," according to William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War fought between 1861 and 1865.

"And the war came,’ was Abraham Lincoln’s conclusion about the War Between the Northern and Southern states.

"The pseudo right of secession is a national wrong," according to Thomas Stonewall Jackson about this national conflict over slavery and union.

"I could have taken no other course without dishonor," was Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s conclusion.

A hundred years later, in the 1960's, Craig Ventner, a corpsman in Viet Nam said the war zone was a "university of death."

"It’s about death and dying," according to Marcus Luttrell, a lone survivor of a Navy Seal operation called Redwing, in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan in 2005.

Enough empirical evidence proves that war is hell, but its memory should be about its heroes.

Two observers of the grand review of the Union armies in Washington D.C. in 1865 following the end of the Civil war wrote: "The whole country claimed these heroes as a part of themselves, an infinite gratification forever to the national self-love; and the thoughtful diplomats who looked on the scene from the reviewing stand could not help seeing that there was a conservative force in an intelligent democracy which the world had never before known."

America fights wars to preserve our freedom. Will there ever be a permanent peace? Though we "contend against evil" and make "no peace with oppression", according to the Book of Common Prayer, will we be able to "reverently use our freedom," and "employ it in the maintenance of justice among men and nations?" Your guess (and hope) is as good as mine.