The Cost of History

            Imagine yourself to be a soldier on the front lines.  War rages on all around you, with its horrific, yet carnally beautiful, display of red flames engulfed in black smoke from the remains of tank and troop truck carcasses.  You struggle to make progress on the battlefield as the conflict’s two sides tear into each other.  The smell of diesel and dirt drifts in from the left and mixes in your nostrils with the stench of burned blood and charred flesh as you fire your weapon at an enemy soldier you think you see a few yards to your right, the acrid aroma of gunpowder rising around you as you trudge your way through the sparse weeds and blood-soaked mud that now contains thousands of spent shell casings in addition to your boot prints and the entrails of fallen buddies.  You hear a split-second *WHOOSH* just beside your ear and see the enemy soldier, the phantom you missed earlier, taking aim once more.  You raise your rifle and fire before he can, hitting him in the neck.  He collapses to the ground; you see his helmet slide off his head and clank on a rock next to his now lifeless form, his uniform stained from dark blue to a nearly-black purple.  You run over in his direction, thinking you can maybe get a bit of headway there—no, not thinking, reacting.  You’re doing this because it’s your job.  It’s because nature says you have to.  Screw the strategy your generals came up with, it’s killed-or-be-killed now, and you just passed your first test. 

            You now stand over the man’s corpse and spot a tree barely five yards to your two o’ clock, its leaves stripped from its burnt branches, of which only a few remain.  It leans to one side, as if to say that it can’t take the battle much longer before giving in to the tide of warfare.  You scan the area around you and crouch down, intending to head over to the tree.  It won’t be much, but cover is cover.  You feel someone brush up behind you and you nearly have a heart attack as you whip around to find one of your buddies now crouched beside you.  You nod and point to the tree, signaling your intend to run over to it.  He nods back and takes off first.  You wait for a few seconds and run behind him, watching his back and hoping someone is watching yours from somewhere.  Before you can process it, though, something knocks you to your side and your vision is blurry, barely tracking the setting around you.  You stare at the tree and wonder why you haven’t gotten there, why you suddenly stopped moving.  Your vision clears some and you try moving your free arm.  A sharp pain erupts from your side and you clumsily clasp your hand on the wound, feeling blood seep through your fingers and onto your uniform.  You can’t feel the leg you’re lying on and you don’t know why.  You blink a few times, trying to understand what just happened.  You try to cry for a medic but it comes out sounding like your dog did when it accidentally strangled itself while running around the family tree it was tied to.  You try moving your other arm and discover it works, so you try dragging yourself closer to the tree.

            As you crawl along at a snail’s pace, incoherent babble stumbling out from your mouth, you encounter a good-sized rock that slows you down.  You slowly realize that it’s no rock—it’s your best friend’s head.  A sense of shock and horror builds in you as you view his torn his face, white as a ghost and drained of any semblance of life.  Aw Christ...oh Jesus...!  You try to form the words with your voice, but they won’t quite come out; just sounds like more babble.  You roll onto your back and hold his head in your hand at your side, feeling your hand lose its grip as you drift in and out of blackness.  You realize that, at this point, all you want is to see your mother.  You try calling out to her, but the words just won’t form in your voice, but at this point, you’re barely aware of anything, let alone how you sound. 

            “Mama...,” is all you manage as you finally fall into mental obscurity.

            A hazy slit of light cracks through your swollen eyes some days later, and after some work for a few minutes, you manage to open them fully.  You almost wish you hadn’t; the light is so harsh.  You cringe for a few seconds, and after a while, don’t notice as your eyes adjust to the new light.  You look around and find yourself lying in a bed, noticing immediately that the familiar rise where your right leg normally was isn’t there.  You struggle to raise your right arm to move the sheet, and are shocked to find the leg is no longer there...

            Over the following weeks and months, you’re told of what happened on the battlefield, of how close you came to dying, of how the shrapnel in your side tore into your intestines and came close to nailing your spine, of how your buddy was blown apart by the shell and killed upon impact, of how the enemy eventually was forced to retreat about twelve hours after your getting wounded. 

            You go through painful rehabilitation and eventually receive a prosthetic leg, now forced to forever walk on a cane.  You’re sent home to your wife, only she’s not your wife anymore because she decided she couldn’t take the two years of waiting for you to return, divorced you while you were still on the battlefront, and eventually married someone else.  You eventually manage to rent out a small apartment, having been honorably discharged from the military due to your injuries.  You mount a shelf across your bed in what becomes your bedroom and place your two bronze stars, one silver star, and three Purple Hearts on it.  You get a couch and spend many evenings just staring at the opposite wall in your living room, trying to make sense of anything.  Why did your buddy die and not you?  What kind of life is a life in which you come home to nothing?  Your parents don’t understand, can’t understand, and none of your civilian friends know anything of what you saw, what you experienced.  You decide after a while that, as much as it hurt to, you would have to start from scratch and rebuild your life.  You stand up and, with a little difficulty, walk out the door with your cane to find a job. 

            Forty years pass, and you now find yourself a happily married man, a family man, with three kids, four grandkids, and one more on the way.  You’re retired at sixty-seven, and though the memories of the war burn within your mind and your heart, you’ve learned to come to peace with what happened.  You did your duty, and you’re damn proud of it.  You’ve long since accepted that this must’ve been God’s plan for you, and though it took a long time in coming, you’re finally, truly happy, and have been for years now, just like when you were a kid, before you enlisted and were sent off to fight.  A memorial has just been erected in the nation’s capital, and on this day, you’ve traveled with your entire family, along with some surviving war buddies, to see it, touch it, cry at its base in relief as you realize that future generations will now have something definitive to look at as proof of the sacrifices made by soldiers such as yourself.

            Now, imagine walking out of the memorial, feeling prouder than ever at having done your duty when your country needed you most.  As you exit the grounds, you see a kid arguing with his mother about having to go to the memorial.  He exclaims that the whole thing was in the past, and as a result, he shouldn’t have to care about it.  You continue to watch as the mother tells her sixteen-year-old to behave, that there were veterans about that sacrificed so much for people like him. 

            “Sacrificed?  SACRIFICED?!  Christ, Mom, that was FORTY YEARS AGO!!  Who cares what they did then, it doesn’t matter now, and it’s not worth remembering!  I wasn’t born then, why should I care about the stupid war?!”

            The teenager storms off, followed closely by his mother as she tosses you an apologetic look. 

            He’d looked right at you as he railed on the history of the war, a history that was made up by the sacrifices soldiers such as yourself made.

            The sad thing is, this is the reality of today’s generation.  While the example I used didn’t specifically state a time period, the fact is, many of today’s new generation are apathetic of anything that occurred before their time.  In fact, anything older than five years that’s not a human is considered “ancient.”   While this has no doubt been aided by the explosion of computer, Internet, and overall technological growth that has occurred in the last quarter century, the fact remains that many today simply don’t think or even consider the sacrifices veterans have made over the years from fighting in wars ranging from World War I to today’s military conflicts throughout the world, particularly in Iraq. 

            A couple years ago, I was sitting in my algebra class, reading Stephen E. Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers.  A brilliantly-written book, it details the struggle of average soldiers, “citizen” soldiers, as they fought their way through World War II.  As I read through the book, one of my classmates sitting beside literally asked me something to the effect of, “Why’re you reading that?  What’s the point?  Live for now, who cares what happened all those years ago?”  Of course, that wasn’t the exact wording, but I assume you get what I’m saying.

            Naturally, I was shocked when I was asked, and responded by saying that history was and still is important; that it teaches us important lessons that, even if the events being studied happened thousands of years ago, can still apply to today’s world.  He shrugged off my statement, thinking it was foolish to care about something that, at the time, had happened almost sixty years ago. 

            This, in a sense, is the true cost of history—no matter what is done and no matter what is lost or gained, as time passes, it will ultimately reach a point in which the average citizen, particularly younger ones, will question the purpose of recalling those events and the people that participated in them.  The building blocks of the future are built upon the sacrifices and hard work put in by those working toward that future.

            “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.”  Though I don’t remember who said that, whoever it was, he or she was dead-on.  In order to appreciate what the future can offer us, we must respect what has been done in the past, as well as concentrate on our lives right now.

            At the very least, even if one believes nothing can be learned from the past, it must still be remembered for the sake of those who lived then.  This is especially true for war veterans, and as you would imagine, most don’t like being told that their actions are pointless when thought of in today’s light.  There’s nothing wrong with “living in the moment,” as many say, but even so, keep in mind the sacrifices so many have made in the past, making it possible for you and those around to have that very life, to say whatever you want, to worship whichever religion you choose (if at all).  Wives have lost husbands, mothers have lost sons, fathers have lost daughters, brothers have lost siblings, cousins have lost cousins, and best friends have been lost to each other for decades.  Yet, in today’s modern world, these things are simply shoved aside and labeled “foolish” and “pointless” to learn and respect.  We cannot have a modern world society respects and loves if, at the same time, it shuns the past—for if this is done, the past will repeat itself, and new horrors will arise once more to take the place of their predecessors.