John McCain is scheduled to speak on foreign policy later today in Los Angeles. In his speech he will address his feelings regarding war.

“When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house in New London, Connecticut, and a Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. My father immediately left for the submarine base where he was stationed. I rarely saw him again for four years.

My grandfather, who commanded the fast carrier task force under Admiral Halsey, came home from the war exhausted from the burdens he had borne, and died the next day.

In Vietnam, where I formed the closest friendships of my life, some of those friends never came home to the country they loved so well.

I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict.

Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.”

The men in my life have been familiar with war. My father was a veteran of World War II, my husband is a Vietnam Veteran and now my son is a veteran of the Global War on Terror. I have never heard one of them talk about loving war. I have heard my husband say that no man who has been to war would ever want there to be a war. None of them are the ‘war mongers’ as they are categorized by the left. They simply understand the awful necessity of war. They understand history and the nature of the world. They know that appeasement is not the answer to the aggression of our enemies and they have the courage to face the harsh realities that we are faced with in this world.

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crossposted at Blue Star Chronicles