Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • January 11, 2012 pain on others. The Aztecs were warriors. They were also cannibals. Boxing is a warrior sport. Sword fighting with bare blades – for first blood, if not for death, widely practiced in Germany, France, and Russia among upper-class boys – is a warrior sport. American street fighting with knives or handguns also falls within this category. Spectator sports are not warrior sports, and neither are most of the unarmed martial arts, except in a wistful sort of way. Basketball, tennis, and computer games are definitely not warrior sports. The Americans we sent into dubious battle in the Middle East were soldiers or sailors but, except for the Navy SEALS and some of the Marines, they were not warriors from a warrior culture. Some of them may have achieved a warrior mentality in training. Many others had serious issues with “kill or be killed” and had to seek help, sometimes for years afterward. This was true even of brave, reliable young Americans who were decorated for valor. They really had a hard time with the idea that killing people was a good thing to do and that getting killed yourself was the best possible way to die and a great way to make your parents proud and impress the girls. Warrior culture is not for Americans, and this is a good thing. Most of my buddies either volunteered for Vietnam, or got siphoned up in the draft. The two guys who won decorations for valor were both expert street fighters. One of them was a helicopter door gunner who killed 14 people, all of them enemy soldiers or legitimate guerilla suspects. I don’t know that he ever lost a wink of sleep over it. My buddies were “heroes.” My own service was “honorable” as in “discharge,” but not in any sense heroic. I was injured in jump training and didn’t get to fight, though I volunteered out of sheer envy because my buddies did. I was in some pretty good street fights on their side, though. I almost got killed in one of them, and a couple of my opponents later went away for first degree murder after another fight. I was not the victim. Let’s call me a stateside combat veteran, but not a hero. Not everybody who wore a uniform in that war or this war was a hero. A hero is someone who sticks his or her neck out to save buddies, gets shot at in an exposed position and keeps shooting back, or keeps functioning when seriously wounded. Many Americans did these things, and some were defamed by stateside draft dodgers as “baby killers” when they never killed a single baby and took pains not to hit civilians. The people who actually did kill babies were not “heroes” but “war criminals” – a title Americans generally bestow only upon people who lose wars and don’t speak English. War criminals bring disgrace and shame on the nations they claim to serve. Civilians who defend these people because they are “our guys” and shrug off the women, children, and prisoners they kill because they are not “our guys” are complicit in their criminality. Heroes exist in all armies. So do thugs. I’m thinking here of the eight guys who allegedly hounded a fellow soldier to death because he was a Chinese-American, the guys on patrol who shot Afghan civilians for sport, and the guys who burned an entire Iraqi family to cover up the rape of one of the daughters. These were not typical, but they were Americans. Let us not sully the flag by draping it over their crimes or daring to call them “heroes.” We have many real heroes. Hannon and his FDNY buddies were real heroes. So were my two buddies from Vietnam. Don’t cheapen the title by hanging it on criminals and thugs. What can Custer’s Last Stand teach us about the late and unlamented war in Iraq? Just this: Neither trip was understood. Custer’s Last Stand happened because the U.S. broke an Indian treaty and “ordered” the Indians to come in to their assigned U.S. Indian Agencies, which some of them had never agreed to accept, at a time when winter weather made travel utterly impossible. Iraq happened because we were looking for weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The Western expert who said they did exist mysteriously turned up dead. So did 4,500 brave young Americans who might have had better things to do with their lives and about 100,000 Iraqi civilians we were “saving” from an oppressive regime. Iraq, incidentally, once tolerated local Christians reasonably well. Now the Christian community of Iraq is living in terror due to the displaced aggression of once-secular Muslims who see their Christian neighbors as a Fifth Column of traitors. This was not our intention – it just sort of happened. You may not hear these numbers elsewhere, but at Custer’s Last Stand 650 soldiers attacked about 800 men and 400 boys from a warrior culture. The soldiers killed about 20 women and children (almost never mentioned) and killed 26 Indian warriors, all of them remembered by name. The Indians killed 268 soldiers and drove the others off the field in utter panic. Those are the numbers. I didn’t make them up. It’s best not to mess with warrior cultures. Iraq, when we invaded, was not a warrior culture. We had better hope we didn’t turn it into one. Welcome the returning veterans, see that they get medical care, therapy, and counseling, and give them top priority for any public-sector jobs they can handle. But do not keep on making “cowards” of people who throw away their lives fighting us, “warriors” out of brave, decent kids who had no idea what they were getting into, or “heroes” out of everybody who put on a uniform. Mission accomplished? You bet it is. America’s leading export is now the oil we acquire overseas, refine in the United States, and sell to foreigners so they can keep polluting the atmosphere and melting the polar cap. That is not what we told these guys they were fighting for. Let’s not blame them for trusting us. They probably won’t do it again. As 2011 was ending, the troops officially came home from Iraq. On Jan. 17, American Experience will broadcast another take on Custer’s Last Stand. How are these events related? From the standard rhetoric, both events are said by some to mark another clash between our “heroes” and their “savages.” That’s not how it works, but rhetoric, after all, is a kind of chicanery to get gullible people to do what you don’t want to do yourself even though you can benefit. As part of today’s rhetoric, we have the abuse of language. Language generally suffers as a prelude to making people suffer. Let’s look at a few cautionary examples. A state resolution endorsed by most local governing bodies described the 9/11 terrorist attack as “cowardly.” Let me state that I had two personal near-brushes with family death in this terroristic outrage. My wife worked in the World Trade Center for several years, though she was not employed there at the time the terrorist murderers struck. In addition, my daughter had two interviews for a job there, but was not hired. Had she been hired, she would have been there during the attack. Last week, while attending the reception after the Wyckoff Township Committee meeting, I found myself gazing at a photograph of Dana Hannon, a New York City firefighter who was killed during the first rescue efforts after the planes hit. While other people ran out of the blazing, tottering buildings, Hannon and his buddies ran into the buildings to save whomever they could. They died saving others with the full knowledge of what they were risking. They were heroes in the truest sense of the word. The terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings were obscene and vicious murderers, but they cannot be semantically called “cowards.” These were people who infiltrated a country they hated and then threw their lives away while they were still young, killing our friends and neighbors and lawful guests. We would be less than human if we did not hate them. I know I do. Were they “cowards?” A coward is someone who runs out on his or her buddies or family – not somebody who dies voluntarily for a cause, however bad or incomprehensible to us. Nobody talks about “cowardly” kamikaze pilots who flew their outmoded aircraft into American ships or “cowardly” Russian pilots who rammed Germans bombers in mid-air. The leaders these pilots served were morally suspect. The Islamic suicide bombers were not “cowards,” though their killing of innocent people is criminal and totally immoral. The Lockerbie bomber – the one a Scottish court released out of “compassion” – was a genuine coward, because he sent somebody else, a woman who trusted him, on the aircraft with the explosives. He is a despicable human being. Next we have the use of the term “warrior” to describe anyone who served. This is also a misnomer. A warrior is a person who grows up in a culture that expects him or her to die in battle. Warrior cultures are not PC. Boys in warrior cultures who stay with the program play brutal games to accustom them to accept pain without flinching and inflict Custer’s Last Stand and the late war in Iraq Art appreciation Ridgewood Artist Lisa Miller and Glen Rock Library Volunteer Xiaolan Zeng organize the January art display at the Glen Rock Library. Miller, who teaches painting at the Lester Stable in Ridgewood on Wednesday mornings, specializes in impressionistic watercolors. The Glen Rock Library, located at 315 Rock Road in Glen Rock, features exhibits by Northwest Bergen County graphic artists on a monthly or seasonal basis.