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Last week, Colorado was honored by a visit from the Leader of the Free World, who stopped in Denver to raise $2.2 million for struggling Republican candidates, then spoke at the graduation ceremony at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
There, he compared the current war in Iraq to World War II, although the similarities escape me. The United States entered the war after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. That was an act of war, and the U.S. Congress responded by declaring war against Japan on Dec. 8. In Germany on Dec. 11, Adolf Hitler honored a treaty commitment with Japan and declared war on the U.S.; Congress then declared war against Germany.
Also note that the 1941 attack came from Japan, and the U.S. went to war against Japan. Now observe that the 2001 attack came from Saudi nationals whose leader was believed to be in Afghanistan at the time, and that the major U.S. response has been against Iraq, which has no discernible connection to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Also, the 1941 declarations followed the federal
Constitution: The Congress shall have power ... To
declare War.
Now see if you can find any declaration of
war against Iraq by the U.S. Congress.
I'm too young to remember World War II -- I was born
five years after it ended -- and even my parents were too
young to see military duty. In grade school, I felt
deprived on that account. On show-and-tell day, other kids
would show up with this here Luger pistol my dad took
off a Kraut he captured,
and our house had no such
souvenirs.
My parents talked about life on the home front during the war, though, especially rationing and recycling. Gasoline was limited to a few gallons a week, and you had to present ration coupons to buy sugar and meat. They saved bacon fat and empty toothpaste tubes, which were collected in every town, along with scrap metal.
As my dad told it, some metal collections weren't
exactly voluntary. Government men would nose around the
Fort Morgan Steam Laundry, which my family owned, and if
they saw unused pieces of brass (like steam valves in the
process of getting rebuilt), the metal went away. My dad
blamed that damn Frankie
for this erosion of
property rights.
So I heard plenty about sacrifice on the home front
then, as opposed to now, when the administration apparently
asks us only to sacrifice our civil liberties in the cause
of protecting freedom.
As a boy, I loved to hear tales of adventure, and there was a World War II combat veteran in the Quillen family: my uncle Gene. He was five years older than my dad, and by the time I knew him, he was an Army major.
Like many WWII veterans, Gene didn't talk much about the war, but he saw plenty of it. He joined the National Guard in 1940 and got called to active duty a year later; his first assignment was guarding the railroad across Raton Pass.
Then he went to Officer Candidate School, which entitled him to the most dangerous job in the military -- second lieutenant in charge of a small infantry combat unit, a duty which provides the approximate life expectancy of a fruitfly's. He fought in the Pacific: the Aleutian, Marshall, Philippine and Okinawa campaigns, and earned two bronze stars and a combat infantry badge.
My brothers and I adored him when he visited, and we would pester him for war stories, hoping to hear how he'd led a charge against a Japanese machine-gun nest to take a vital island, or something like that.
But he always changed the subject. When I asked him
about it a few years ago, he said that there had been a
time in his life when he was a professional killer,
but it was in the past and he wanted to leave it there.
Fair enough. He was 81 when he died in Florida on April 3, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on April 26. No matter what they dedicate on the National Mall, he'll always be my World War II memorial.
And if our President needs to find historical parallels
for the current operations in Iraq, there are plenty that
fit better than World War II -- say, the invasion of Mexico
in 1846, or the liberation
of the Philippines in
1898.
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