by Tom Pantera
Columnist

I understand sacrifice, but there are some kinds of sacrifice that I can’t get my head around. This is going to sound deeply offensive, but stick with me. I’m not trying to offend, believe me.

I’ve never really understood the idea of “dying for your country.”

It’s something we hear often, especially in wartime. People who die in a war die “for their country.” But what I don’t understand – and I’m talking on an emotional level here – is the concept of “dying for” something so broad.

George Patton famously said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” That makes a lot of sense to me. (And Napoleon may have even come closer to the nut of the problem when he said, “I can make men die for bits of ribbon.”)

Maybe it’s because I think of individual cases. There are times when it’s easy to understand – say, if somebody dies in the process of trying to rescue somebody else. But take the case of a soldier who simply takes a bullet or gets blown up by an IED. They’re dead, but did they actually die “for” something?

Of course, in a broad sense, they did. Anybody who goes to war in these days of the all-volunteer military is taking a step that not everybody does. They do so knowing they have a chance of dying, but they still go. And that calculus is itself noble and even heroic.

But when the Grim Reaper taps that person on the shoulder, at that moment are they “dying for” anything, or did they just get unlucky? Does the fact that some guy gets blown to atoms matter to anybody outside his family and friends? Does it affect the war itself?

I’ll be the first to admit it’s a question I’ve never faced and most probably never will. I’m not, in any way, judging the deaths of such people. It’s just that to me, part of the tragedy is that so many die, even in war, for murky reasons. The hawks – especially those who are directly responsible for getting us into war – love to talk reverently about those who die for their country, but they never explain how individual deaths benefit the nation.

Now, there are times when it’s understandable. Not to split hairs, but soldiers who died in Afghanistan were going after people who actually had attacked us. There’s a direct link there.

But I wonder about the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, or the German army in World War II, or for that matter, the Americans who died in Vietnam and Iraq, two wars we never should have gotten involved in. These are people who died for causes that were on the wrong side of history and, in the case of German soldiers who fought during World War II, died defending a truly evil system. In the case of Vietnam and Iraq – and this is not an issue for the common soldiers, but for those who got us into those wars – we were fighting people who posed virtually no threat to us. I realize that can be debated, but the domino theory went the way of the dodo bird long ago.

How do you look at a mother who’s lost a son in a war and tell her he or she died for a mistake? You can say they “died for their country,” but if you unpack that it’s a hard case to make.

Of course, those who die fighting for the wrong side are just as dead. And it’s not their fault they were on the wrong side. The decisions that sent them to their deaths were made far above their pay grade, often by people who don’t have to pay any real price for those decisions. I’m sure Dick Cheney sleeps pretty well, but even if he doesn’t, he at least gets to wake up.

My understanding is that when people are in the thick of battle, they aren’t thinking about the large geopolitical ideas that sent them there. I’ve heard many times that soldiers in battle fight for one reason: the comrades that are next to them. That makes a lot sense. That’s where I can understand “dying for” something, because the thing a person is dying for is concrete. It doesn’t get much more concrete than the guy’s who’s standing next to you.

Actually, what made me think of all this wasn’t war. It was Boston. I was thinking about the MIT cop who got shot in his police car. His death helped set off the chain of events that led to the killing of one bomber and the capture of the second. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time (even though willingness to die is part of a cop’s qualifications). But his death, senseless and tragic as it was, at least gained some meaning when it led to the resolution of the situation. You can honestly say his death meant something.

The death of any soldier means something too. It’s just that the meaning is a bit murkier in a lot of instances. The meaning lies more in what it all means to the soldier’s loved ones. I honestly think nobody who died in Vietnam made the world as a whole one bit safer. They might have died for a lot of reasons, some of them even good, but ensuring world peace wasn’t one of them. And again, that’s the fault of the nation’s leaders and those who profit from war, not of the grunts. (I’m not alone in this, by the way; read “All Quiet on the Western Front.”)

I’m not a pacifist. Some wars have reasons. But many don’t, or at least not good reasons. World War I killed an entire generation of European men and basically resulted from an internecine pissing match among a lot of inbred European royalty.

I really wish that those who send our sons and daughters to war would think about that. They probably never will, but if they did fewer parents, spouses and children will have to wonder why their loved one didn’t come home.