OP-ED: War games
I went to my friend Marshall’s birthday party when I was in elementary school. “So what?” you say. “We all went to birthday parties.” That is most certainly true, and I’ve forgotten most that I attended, but this particular party remains in my memory because it has bearing on the adult I (think) I am today.
We played party games with Marshall and our friends, and I was fortunate enough to win a prize for one of them. The prize was several copies of a comic book featuring “Sgt. Rock.” The fictional Franklin John Rock, a sergeant in Easy Co. of the U.S. Army, was first featured in “Our Army at War #83,” a DC Comic issued in June 1959, which probably approximates the date of Marshall’s party. I was 10, and America was still locked in the jingoistic phase it entered with World War II and finally withdrew from around 1964, with American boots dripping bloody mud from the quagmire of Vietnam.
I was familiar with Sgt. Rock because my barber had copies in his shop, and I eagerly devoured them while I waited for my hair to be crew cut and butch waxed. My interest in reading them was a natural extension of the game of “Army,” which my friends and I spent many a summer’s day playing, using sticks for rifles and rocks for hand grenades. So I proudly carried the prize home — where my mom made me take them back to Marshall’s and get other, less violent ones. Seems she had the funny idea that reading comic books that glorified war might give me bad ideas.
I’ve written before about how my parents bought me almost every toy gun available during the Fifties, so Mom’s decision to discharge Sgt. Rock is somewhat puzzling today, particularly because she had to have known that I was playing “Army.” I stopped playing that game not long after.
But today I understand my mom’s thoughts, particularly when I see Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth doing his best Sgt. Rock imitation while briefing the American public on what the Trump administration is calling “Operation Epic Fury” — the really cool, macho name for America’s unauthorized incursion into Iran. Republicans are tripping over themselves to call the attacks anything but a “war”: a “major combat operation”; a “mission”; “hostilities.” With good reason.
Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war, and the United State has not been in a “war” since Japan surrendered in 1945. So how did we wind up in Iran? I’m thinking that President Trump’s mother and Hegseth’s allowed them to read Sgt. Rock comics.
At the beginning of the Persian Gulf “war” in 1991, many in the United States laughed when Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein told Iraqis, “The battle in which you are locked today is the mother of all battles.” But on March 2, Secretary Hegseth said, “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” Really?
Sgt. Rock could’ve told him that military personnel and civilians killed during an “operation” are just as dead as those killed during “war.”
But according to DC Comics, Rock was killed “on the last day of World War II by the last enemy bullet fired.”
I guess Hegseth stopped reading before that.