21 September 20
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FOCUS: Charles Pierce | All Wars Are Forever
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "For all the talk of extricating ourselves from 'forever wars,' we will always leave things behind."
don't know why but, sometimes, a story pops that strikes me as profoundly sorrowful and prompts a kind of despair that makes me wonder if we ever stop paying for the sins we commit as one species among many. There is a lot of talk in the campaign about ending "forever wars." The president* loves to say that he has ended the "forever wars," which is a lie, of course, but whatever. In one way or another, all wars are forever. From the Guardian:
Australian Trent Lee and Briton Stephen “Luke” Atkinson died when an unexploded ordnance is believed to have detonated shortly after 7.30pm on Sunday. The blast, inside the men’s rented accommodation in Tasahe, in the west of the city, was felt more than five kilometres away: cries for help from inside brought rescuers and emergency services to the building...
The two men were employees of the NGO Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), which maps unexploded ordnance across Solomon Islands, working alongside the police bomb disposal unit. Solomon Islands was a key second world war battleground and its islands remain littered with thousands of bombs and unexploded ordnance more than seven decades later. Workers are in the capital, on the island of Guadalcanal, clearing sites of bombs ahead of the 2023 Pacific Games.
I had no idea that there were people doing this incredibly dangerous work. (And, yes, it probably wasn't advisable to have brought this work home to a residential area.) I had some idea that there was still ordnance scattered around the South Pacific, but no idea that there were people dedicated to finding it and defusing it. (I also had no idea that they were planning to hold the Pacific Games on Guadalcanal.) This sounds of a piece with the fact that the defoliants and ordnance that we left behind in Southeast Asia during our most recent war in that part of the world are still killing people. There already are similar stories from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and a dozen other places because, as much as we hate to admit it, we are a violent species, and all our wars are forever wars.
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