At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in
1918, the guns of the War to End All Wars fell silent. The survivors crawled
out of their trenches, scraped caked mud off their uniforms and tried to
understand how to live normal lives again.
Well—that was a pipe dream; societies always try to return to normal
after cataclysms, but the fact is, “normal” is one of the first casualties of
wartime service. Along with truth.
I thought a lot about that as I visited the military cemeteries of
the Western Front—French, British, German, American. More than other
graveyards, military cemeteries display the true democracy of death: the
uniformity of the headstones; regular rows; whatever the rank, no one more
elaborate than any other. But that’s the dead: the living (more or less)
returned to their homes to find that their governments wanted them to resume
their pre-war stations on pre-war terms, and their families wanted them to
pretend they hadn’t been through what they had.
We still do that—send men and women out to do the worst things
imaginable and then ignore the human consequences, pretending that being a sapper
or a tanker is just like being a plumber or a marketer. The fact that our
longest-war-ever is not even a national effort, the way the World Wars were,
keeps the blood-and-treasure costs out of mind for most Americans. If you’re
not serving or know someone who is, it’s easy to ignore the price of policy.
Well, it’s Veterans Day here in the US, one of two days that we
pay lip service to the sacrifices made by those who serve in our defense. Who
take their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies,
foreign and domestic, and pay a steep price for it. I am grateful for all of them, all the generations of
them. And I’m grateful to be working with many of them who continue their
service by protecting our cybersecurity.
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