Bring Yer Welllies

It was Kevin Kelly, with his chopped off wellies
In the middle of the summer time he was looking fine!
--Kelly's Wellies, Gaelic Storm
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Sitting in a truck stop after tropical depression Fay has blown through his landscape, Ranger was reflective. Being in a truck stop always makes me so, but today it is not FOX News which causes the thought (Yes, even truck stops impose that garbage upon you.) Maybe it's puttering around in my old jungle boots because of the rainy weather. Ranger is not a Wellies or Crocs kind of guy.

Last night my little fire base lost all power due to the storm, and this led to thoughts of Baghdad and the world that endures largely without electricity or operates routinely through daily outages. This morning the deer stood stoically under the pear trees, enduring the heavy rain while looking for a meal.

The deer flashed me back to times that Ranger stood under trees enduring nature; the cold, rain, monsoons, typhoons, and like those deer, just stood and endured. This is one fact that all veterans know: We were all animals caught in a storm beyond our control.

This knowledge is what makes us veterans. Forget badges, tabs and awards, which are the symbols. The reality is that we weathered storms and did our jobs.

Ranger next thought of the naturalists of the late 19th-early 20th century who saw nature a a neutral force, moving our lives disinterestedly. Fay is just a fact of nature, neither good nor evil. Natural history is the same -- a recitation of facts which just are.

The most common question I encounter is, "Are you against all wars, or just Iraq?" (Afghanistan is usually ignored, as though a given.) Both have morphed into the entertainment that is www.PWOT.com.

In the past, Ranger answered that most wars are are futile exercises in human endeavor. Going with the naturalist point of view, wars seem to be a natural occurrence for men. Damaging and sometimes mortally so, but just a fact.

The Revolutionary War and Civil War might be exempt if one imagines them justified and righteous, but even my thinking on those wars has changed. Even they could have been resolved politically and humanistically. Neither of those wars were Good Wars. All wars are bad, and good cannot come from their inhumanity and brutality.

England banned slavery without a civil war, and Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India and Pakistan became independent without launching major wars. If man has the capacity to reason, then reason should dominate his actions; wars are never acts of reason.

Wars are shameful, and that is why they are glorified. Labeling soldiers "warriors", giving medals, adulation, etc., all hide the shame of a society that destroys life and batters bodies and condemns them to a lifetime of physical and psychological suffering.

Wars begun without physical provocation are the common man being elevated to warriors doing the bidding of leaders with faulty moral compasses. Going to war is not an exercise of freedom; it is another form of slavery.