“War Is Hell!” General William Tecumseh Sherman, June 19, 1879

“I am tired and sick of war…Its glory is all Moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

This quote came across my Facebook page this morning, and it struck a long silent chord of sadness deep within me. These simple, clear words are as sharp and pointed as a double-edged sword. They are at once true and too often unheard, neglected, or forgotten completely.

These powerful words were spoken by a man of combat, one who had led his Union troops throughout the bloodiest war in our history. Like all such men, indeed, like all of us, he was a complex and flawed human being. His leadership and actions, especially on his sweep through Georgia toward the end of the war, were as violent, bloody and desolating as any during that costliest of wars, our Civil War. And in the years following these wise words, he would be become deeply involved in the horrors of the “Indian Wars” in the West.

Sherman is a perfect example of the self-contradiction we are all vulnerable to and even guilty of at times. His words at the top of this article are true, even charged with wisdom. They come from the depths of his soul and were born of his combat experiences during the Civil War. They are, in a very real way, the words and the prayers of every combat veteran. War is hell! It is the greatest failing of our shared humanity. It is the product of the worst angels of our nature, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.

Every generation of combat-wearied veterans hopes and prays that their sons/daughters will never have to go to war. Those hopes and prayers are born out of the horrors they have witnessed and participated in in their own lives. And those words do ring true to all of us who have been there.

But here is the truth too. Humanity has not matured enough to practice what it preaches, to live in accord with the shared wisdoms of our own experience. Those dark angels are never far from us. We witness them in the violence we so often see in our society, in the angry, threatening words we hurl at each other on social media or in public.

If I am honest with myself, I would have to admit my own dark angels and the tendency to strike first and ask questions later. The wisdom of Sherman’s words bumps up against my own experience and that of my own family. Over the last century, every generation of my family has sent its young men off to war.

My great uncle on my mother’s side was a Marine in WWI with 3/5, one of those who would be given the name “Devil Dogs” by the Germans they faced. He came home and suffered from the devastating effects of PTSD for the rest of his life and died a homeless man in Portland, OR. My mother’s brother and my father served in WWII, and my uncle was an LCI driver landing Marines in the Pacific. I served as an FMF Corpsman with Bravo 3rd Recon at Khe Sanh and on patrols afterward. One of my sons-in-law served as a Marine combat engineer in Iraq. Every generation of my family over the last century has gone to war, seen the terrors and horrors of combat.

Yes. War is hell, and because we have not matured enough as a human race, we are forced to live a contradiction, a paradox, with the realization that we must remain ready and be prepared to go to war again.

This is our dilemma, isn’t it? We are, on the one hand, wise enough to see the truth that war is hell, but on the other hand, we are not yet wise enough, self-disciplined enough, or mature enough to prevent the awful threat of war.

It makes me remember the old Peter, Paul, and Mary folk song lyrics: “When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?”