Our mission is to win the war

In the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is a scene where hero Capt John Miller directs his team to assault an enemy machine gun nest. His team understandably is a bit reluctant to do so. One of the men points out that assaulting the machinegun nest is not really their mission. Without a moment’s hesitation, Miller looks the man in the eyes and says, “Our mission is to win the war.”

Now you’d like to think that actors learn something from the roles they play. Apparently they don’t. In Saving Private Ryan, Capt Miller was played by Tom Hanks. Hanks recently endorsed B-HO - which proves the point. Actors are like 99.99% of politicians, they are just reading the lines. Adding insult to the point, Hanks produced the real life story of Easy Company of the US Army 101st Airborne division - Band Of Brothers.

I have wondered on this page before what if we all just wanted to win the war. Forget the endless BS liberal debate on how we got into the war in Iraq. We’re there. Let’s just win the damned thing.

There is a thing called cognitive dissonance that explains why low paid employees will express greater satisfaction with their jobs than highly paid workers. The theory goes that the low paid worker will rationalize why they stay with their low paid job by expressing love for the company, the boss or the job itself.

This was all explained to me by some egghead somewhere long ago to explain why Marines are so loyal to the Corps. The reasoning goes, Marines are underpaid, treated like sh*&, get the worst equipment and are expected to do everything with nothing. Yet Marines for the most part are the most loyal to their service branch. There is nothing to explain that loyalty other than cognitive dissonance i.e. over the top irrational rationalization.

I tried to explain - what to him was the Marine mystique - with words like, history, tradition, élan, esprit, brotherhood etc. all to no avail. Finally I told him he’d just have to sign up to understand the whole thing.

Well I think that America needs a bit of reality with regard to the war on terror. I don’t see a country at war when I look around America. I see an armed services and their families at war but not a country. America is like the highly paid worker who feels fine about irrationally cussing the company or the boss because after all he’s making a lot of money and has nothing to rationalize with regard to his own position. America goes along uninterrupted with very few war related inconveniences. So it’s easy to complain about the country, the president, SecDef, the Army, the UN et al.

It’s been a while since Lex expounded on his theory of halves – it’s probably down to quarters by now. Only ¼ of Americans believe we’re in a war. Only ¼ of those who believe we’re actually in a war have any idea of what is required to win. Only ¼ of those who have a hint of what is required to win have any idea of what is at stake.

Right now America needs more Capt Millers - our mission is to win the war - and fewer Tom Hanks – vote for B-HO so we can quit.