Home of the Brave 
Michael Ennis
My Father’s War
As a naval officer at Okinawa, my dad survived one of the most hellish battles of World War II. What he learned there tells us everything we need to know about Iraq.
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However, once the administration had finally accepted that the dead-enders might be around for a while, it was deft in putting a face on the insurgency. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell mentioned Abu Musab al-Zarqawi twenty times in his infamous February 2003 speech presenting the United Nations all the reasons why Saddam had to be stopped; among the evidence that we later had to back away from was the certainty that Zarqawi, who had set up a training camp in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, was a bin Laden associate. This fiction became a self-fulfilling prophecy when a year later Zarqawi, who had previously feuded with bin Laden, swore loyalty to him and renamed his operation Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In many ways we were Zarqawi’s publicists as he rose to terror superstardom, President Bush repeatedly mentioning the Jordanian jailbird in his speeches. By the time we killed Zarqawi in June, he had become not only the face of the Iraqi insurgency but also the new poster boy of international terrorism.
Yet foreign fighters like Zarqawi remain a single-digit percentage of the Iraqi insurgency, and his dedicated group was considerably smaller still; a far greater danger is posed by the Shiite militias that have heavily infiltrated the same security forces that are supposed to stand up so that we can stand down. However, Zarqawi’s martyrdom has given President Bush and his surrogates an opportunity to recite with renewed conviction an old mantra that may yet save their party’s congressional majorities: We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. But even if we don’t reach an electoral tipping point (“stay the course” is likely to trump “cut and run”), a Republican escape this fall will be the 2004 buyer’s remorse all over again, with public approval for the president, Congress, and their war in Iraq quickly plunging to a new nadir. That’s because of Okinawa lesson number two: Every war, even a popular one, has a shelf life.
Our nation had been at war with Japan for three years and almost four months on the day we invaded Okinawa, almost exactly the same length of time we’ve been at war in Iraq. When major combat operations ended on Okinawa in late June 1945, more than 250,000 American servicemen, Japanese soldiers, and Okinawan civilians had died on the slender, 65-mile-long island. President Harry Truman (much admired by the current president) and his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, both of them World War I combat veterans, looked at the dreadful casualties and extrapolated the figures for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, scheduled to begin in a few months. They concluded that the final conquest of Japan, essentially a giant Okinawa with 4 million soldiers dug into imposing defensive positions and a civilian population of 75 million prepared to pitch in with bamboo spears and carpenter’s awls, would probably cost upward of 1 million American lives and 20 million Japanese and require anywhere from eighteen months to ten years. Truman’s generals tried to fudge the numbers to sex up the invasion, but the buck-stops-here commander in chief knew enough about war to realize that the shelf life of his was running out. Which brings us to lesson number three: If you’re serious about winning your war, you need a Manhattan Project.
Truman gambled that in dropping two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, he could deliver a foreboding message to the intransigent Japanese militarists hunkered down in Tokyo and avoid an invasion that might well bring us to our knees. He had that option thanks to the foresight of his predecessor, who had authorized the bomb-building Manhattan Project, drawing together the best and brightest from all over the political spectrum to unravel nature’s fundamental secrets. Today we have an administration that prefers the expertise of the most loyal and ideological, and its idea of a Manhattan Project seems to be the “world’s largest embassy” we’re building in the middle of Baghdad’s hermetically sealed Green Zone. However, as many wise Iraq war supporters and opponents alike have noted, our hand in the global war on terror would be immeasurably strengthened if our Manhattan Project was an all-hands-on-deck initiative to develop alternative sources of energy and end our addiction to imported oil.
Truman’s gamble worked, and in another chapter of the Greatest Generation saga, my father came home, met my mother, and began to raise his family. Though he never wore a uniform again, I think he always loved the Navy, and he’d talk about life at sea and strange-sounding islands; we often laughed that he ran our house like a ship of the line. About war itself, less was said. He never once said he had risked his life so that I could be free, never passed a flag with a tear in his eye and talked about men he’d seen die for it. He could have received veteran’s disability benefits for the rest of his life, but he voluntarily discontinued them a few years after the war ended. Only late in his life did he set his Silver Star and Purple Heart atop a little keepsake box in a spare bedroom. The sole prerogative of his service that he expected was the right to say, when the conversation turned to subjects like Vietnam or Iraq, “Unless you’ve seen war, you don’t know.”
I don’t think I really had an idea what I didn’t know until I traced my dad’s life back to Okinawa. What he knew is the final lesson of his generation’s global war: War is not a virtuous activity. The men and women who wage it often possess great virtue, like my dad, but war itself never does. As a nation we recoil in horror at Abu Ghraib and Haditha. But on Okinawa, where the Japanese tortured and beheaded captive Americans, we routinely shot enemy prisoners; my father watched Japanese pilots machine-gunned as they parachuted into the sea. And it is no mere footnote that more than 150,000 civilians perished in Okinawa’s “typhoon of steel.” War is the best means to kill our fellow man; sometimes he richly deserves it and civilization must risk itself to give him his due. But war is not the best means for a nation to become more virtuous or spread its values, and we misunderstand its fundamental nature if we are shocked when it becomes truly ugly.
During this campaign season we will be reminded again and again that we are at war, but we should know that war has nothing to do with ribbons on the backs of SUVs and captive audiences of career soldiers hoo-rahing a president who will never have to adequately explain how he spent two years of his National Guard duty. But that’s just my opinion, because like all those steely-eyed podium patriots who so blithely took us to war in Iraq, everything I know about war I learned secondhand.
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