“Jesus would never/ Forgive what you do”

by David Benjamin

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain…” — from The War Prayer by Mark Twain

MADISON, Wis.—When he came before the House Armed Services Committee to justify Donald Trump’s excellent adventure in Iran, warmonger-in-chief Pete Hegseth asked Congressman John Garamendi (D-Cal.), “Who are you cheering for here? Who are you pulling for?”

There are countless reasons to wonder how history’s largest military force has devolved to the plaything of an alcoholic TV host who comes off as a poor man’s Bob Eubanks (who, himself, was a poor man’s Monty Hall) and keeps spouting about Jesus being on our side …

Okay, let’s pause right there. Speaking at a Pentagon prayer service last month …

Okay, let’s pause right there. The Pentagon is not a church, the Defense Secretary is not …

Okay, let’s pause right there. Reverend Hegseth wants to call himself the Secretary of War. He likes the word “war.” He prefers to call the Pentagon’s job “war-fighting” and our soldiers and sailors, Marines and pilots “warriors” guided by a “warrior ethos” that makes the U.S. military the most “lethal” force on Earth and in Heaven. Terms like “GI,” “grunt,” “gyrene” and “citizen soldier” have been censored out of the Hegseth lexicon. He wouldn’t recognize Willie and Joe if they walked up and snuffed out their cigarettes in his hairdo.

But I digress.

Speaking at a Pentagon prayer service last month, Hegseth intoned a misquote, from the movie Pulp Fiction of a Biblical verse, Ezekiel, 25:17, which goes, “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance upon them.”

It should be noted that Ezekiel, which covers the Israelites war against the pagan Philistines and Cherethites, is one of the bloodiest and spookiest books of the Old Testament. When Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino re-wrote Scripture, he conveyed pretty faithfully the Ezekiel spirit. His parody, spoken by Samuel L. Jackson while holding a gun to another man’s head, goes like this: “I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!”

This sounds fairly true to the original until you reach the passage that Hegseth skipped. Jackson went on to say, “Mr. .45 here, he’s the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men.”

And then, more devil than angel, Jackson blows the guy’s brains out.

Speak of the devil, Hegseth’s query to Garamendi about “Who are you pulling for?” is an expression of moral vacuity that should have appalled every member of the Armed Services Committee. Implying that war is a game, like football and croquet, Hegseth’s blithe assumption is that a war can be won.

C’mon, Pete. Look back.

Since 1945, the United States has not “won” a war, nor has any nation done so. The Allied victory over the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire came only after the deaths of at least seventy million people, seven-tenths of them civilians. The closest any country can come to claiming victory since World War II is Vietnam, who drove out the French and then spent 1.3 million lives—Vietnamese and American—defeating the United States.

But, what price glory? The ghastly death toll, the catastrophic environmental damage, the lingering pall of rage and grief, and Vietnam’s descent into a dictatorship that would have broken Ho Chi Minh’s heart is a result that only a sadist could regard as triumph.

War of attrition, in which two sides wear each other out at a horrible cost in both human life and treasure, is the norm for virtually every international conflict since the Japanese surrendered eighty years ago. It applies to mankind’s latest bloody fiascos in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Iran, in Sudan, etc.

The grueling grind of attrition applied, of course, to the first war that captured my attention. In tenth grade, out of curiosity, I read This Kind of War, T.R. Fehrenbach’s brilliant history of the maddening, teeter-totter Korean conflict. The book is a study in futility. It shook my assumption, common to every boy born after 1945, that I would compliantly go straight from high school to a couple of obligatory, but largely uneventful years in “the service.” I didn’t think to challenge this inevitability until an insidious corps of historians (Fehrenbach), novelists (Erich Maria Remarque, Dalton Trumbo, Joseph Heller), and poets (Wilfred Owen, Edgar Lee Masters, Bob Dylan and, of course, Twain’s “War Prayer”) planted in me the seed of doubt.

It was doubt that landed me at a hearing room in Madison in June, 1969, where I was tasked with explaining to my local Draft Board my moral objections to joining “the service.” Even faced with my likely demise in Vietnam, I was ambivalent about opposing my conscription. I knew there were wars that had to be fought. As I was growing up, almost all the grownup men I knew, and emulated, had been to at least one war. The ordeal of doing bad things in a good cause had left most of them reticent, regretful and riven with doubt.

When facing the Draft Board, however, doubt wasn’t an option. Privately, I was ambivalent, but in this court, before this jury, abiding by the rules of this game, I was obliged, as a matter of survival, to be absolute. I dared not oppose just this war, or some wars, but all wars in every circumstance, from the fall of Troy to the Tet offensive. I had to sanctimoniously renounce every war, regardless of provocation and consequences. So, I wove a web of tactical sophistry, selling a moral purity that I did not, could not, feel.

I’ll never know if the members of the Draft Board swallowed my pitch. But I gave them, apparently, just enough reason to certify me as a “conscientious objector,” sending me to alternative service in a Boston hospital rather than in the killing fields of A Shau and Khe Sanh.

My ambivalence stuck with me for years afterward. But it dissipated in contemplation of the wars waged since Vietnam, almost all of which should not have been fought, and a few wars—in Rwanda, perhaps, and in Pinochet’s Chile—that might have been fought but weren’t. I realized, at last, that I was right to oppose the very idea of war. Looking back at all the carnage that has followed my day at the Draft Board, I can say without ambivalence that America has gained nothing from all those military enterprises, and lost immensely.

I was four years old when the truce suspending the Korean War was signed, certifying that four million people, including more than 30,000 American troops, had died in vain. Since then, we’ve killed and been killed in further tens of thousands. But for all that blood and heartbreak, we find our nation still subject to pompous cowards like Pete Hegseth. We find our world still mired in the same No Man’s Land that we created—sowing it with land mines—at Panmunjom in 1953.

The game, God help us, remains afoot.