Collateral Damage

I can not recall when I first heard the term ‘collateral damage’. I know it was years ago and that I found it to be a very callous term as it tends to dehumanize the victims of warfare.

I do recall when that term made its deepest cut into my soul. It was during a visit to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in November of 2000. I had gone to Honolulu for a basketball tournament and was spending a day visiting the various memorials to our servicemen who died in the Japanese attack of December 7, 1941.

The USS Arizona Memorial is the most famous of these and I spent a good deal of time there. I observed the “tears of the Arizona”, the leaking oil that still seeps to the surface one drop at a time. I read the name of each sailor who died in the attack carved in the marble of the memorial. After spending time reading those names I felt compelled to visit the numerous memorials to the other ships that were lost and read the names of those dead also. It was a very solemn occasion for me. These men were almost all volunteers who had joined the military to serve their country. (The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, our first peacetime conscription, was not passed until September 17 of that year.) They gave up certain rights to defend ordinary citizens like me. I feel tremendous gratitude towards these and all servicemen and women.

But it was the last memorial that I visited on that day that struck me so deeply. The one to the 68 civilians killed.

These people were residents of Honolulu. They were infants and elderly, teenagers and middle-aged. They came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. And none were killed by Japanese bombs. They all died as a result of stray anti-aircraft shells landing in their neighborhoods.

So who bears the responsibility for the deaths of these innocents? The Americans who were firing wildly into the air while trying to defend themselves? Of course not. How about the Japanese pilots who were participating in the attack? No, not them either. They were merely pawns on a chess board. No, the ultimate responsibility lies with the policy makers in Imperial Japan who planned the attack and orchestrated the policy of military aggression in the first place. The Japanese warlords as we Americans like to call them, or in other words, the Japanese military-industrial complex. Those who weighed the consequences of their actions in the weeks, months and years before the attack and who decided these civilian deaths would be “worth it”, in the words of a former US Secretary of State, in order that the country’s military, political and economic desires could be achieved.

Later these policymakers, who were proponents of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, would be held accountable as war criminals for their policies. Policies that we Americans viewed as crimes against humanity but they viewed as merely a pre-emptive action in defense of their national interests. Policies that bear a striking similarity to those put forth by the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century in their papers outlining how modern American foreign policy should be carried out.

And let us not think that collateral damage is limited to the deaths of civilians during a military conflict. No, the damage goes much deeper than that. It has to include the social and psychological damage done to the families of servicemen who lose their soldier, sailor or marine. It has to include the damage done to the servicemen who come home knowing in their heart of hearts that they were not fighting in defense of their country but as aggressors who are spreading imperialism. It has to include the loss of a nation’s productivity when resources are spent on tools of destruction instead of consumer goods, on guns instead of butter. It has to include the strain put on a nation divided over these policies. And it has to include the erosion of civil liberties that coincides with militarism.

When the war in Iraq first began I sat watching news reports with a friend of mine who was in complete support of our attack. A story came on about a young boy whose family was killed and whose arms were blown off by an American bomb. My friend, a college professor who occasionally had work in the World Trade Center, expressed sorrow over the plight of this child. That was too much for me to bear at the time. I told him not to be a hypocrite. If he was going to support an aggressive war against Iraq, a country he was convinced at the time was behind the 9/11 attacks, then he must accept the collateral damage that goes with such an aggressive war. He must accept the horror and the terror that goes with war and embrace it as his own. I thought it might be the end of our friendship. Luckily, it was not. Today he opposes the war and realizes that it was and is a mistake. And he realizes that our current administration deceived him about Iraq’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the other reasons given for going to war.

My friend is just one of many Americans who are opening their eyes, however reluctantly, to what is going on in our country. We must do what we can to educate and change the minds of those who continue to support aggression and imperialism and the collateral damage that goes with it. And we must hold accountable those politicians and policymakers from both parties who not only continue to implement and support these destructive policies, but those who acquiesce to them as well.

The time is here for us all to join together and work for a return to the policies of commerce and trade with all, but entangling alliances with none, that served us well in the past. For if we do not we will see that the collateral damage of our policies is not just in lives and goods, but in the loss of our civil liberties as well. Let it not be said that we stood by and did nothing as our republic crumbles around us under the weight of empire.