Pen Meets Paper Nov.15'10

Opinion by Helge Nome
We commonly speak of three kinds of scourges that affect humanity: Fire, flood and pestilence. Last week we gave ourselves a reminder of a fourth kind that has literally buried generations of human beings: The scourge of war. And the short and brutal message is: “Lest we forget”.
And we did forget when we committed young Canadian lives to experience the trauma of war in a troubled place on the other side of the globe. Our civil servants and politicians forgot that this is a place where generations have experienced the nightmare of war, its brutality, whether by way of swords or drones, to bring experiences with them home that continue in their bedrooms in the night, when demons emerge from cupboards and engulf the sleeping bodies in the room. In many ways, those that died were the lucky ones. In the quiet hours, the stench of war again fills the nostrils in the form of the smell of cordite from exploding munitions. The mortal fear of driving an armored vehicle along a road knowing full well that you could be engulfed in an inferno of flames, and screams of tortured metal and comrades, at any moment. That’s what war is all about for those that participate in it, and that is why they don’t want to talk about it.