Michael A. Cathcart

Sept. 10, 2015

Monday, September 21 is the 30th annual International Day of Peace. World leaders will pay lip service and nothing more.

In Traverse City, the festivities will take place on the more convenient Saturday before, starting at the Clinch Park beach at 8am. There will be a march, there will be signs, there will be speeches. Hope for elusive peace will be the theme (and if previous years experience is a guide, there will also be people protesting those asking for peace. You would have to ask them why).

Peace is not something the world or the U.S. has been especially good at fostering. Ever.

There are written records of wars as early as 2,500 BCE though untold unrecorded wars surely took place earlier.

We were born in war, fought our most horrifying war to save the country and then had to fight a couple of world wars to stop megalomaniacs from taking over the world and slaughtering everyone they didn’t like in the process.

In between, we’ve fought military actions on every continent but Antarctica and started sending our troops elsewhere within a couple decades of our becoming a country. It’s a bad habit we haven’t been able to break in more than two centuries since.

A brief glance at just a tiny sampling of our adventures would include forays into Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia... and that’s just in our half of the world.

Even now, according to our Department of Defense (DOD), we have military bases – not just personnel, but actual bases – in a stunning 74 countries. We still have 40,000 troops in Germany and 50,000 in Japan fully 70 years after the end of World War II. Add 28,000 in South Korea 60 years after that conflict ended. We’re all over Europe, the Middle East, Asia; we’re even in Australia, helping protect them from who knows what.

We not only seem to believe we are the world’s police force, we’ve put our cops on the beat nearly everywhere. There’s no evidence it’s brought us peace; it just informs the world we’re always ready to go to war.

We can’t seem to help ourselves. The men and women who serve in these far-flung locales only do so because it is the will of politicians, those who finance their campaigns and, apparently, the voters who elect them.

War, always big business, is now perpetual big business. The military-industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned us, is now in full flower, and the industrial side of that equation has figured out how to make sure the contracts keep rolling in.

Defense contractors who used to have operations on each coast have learned to spread the wealth. Design, research, manufacturing, assembly, sales and administration are now all in different locations. Lockheed Martin, for example, which builds the new F-35 fighter, has operations in 21 different states. Any time a defense contract might be cancelled, 42 senators are ready to fight for the jobs in their home states.

It doesn’t even really matter what the military wants. The F-35 attack fighter, the latest and most expensive military aircraft ever, has a very reliable engine designed and built by Pratt and Whitney. All three branches of the military that will use this aircraft – the Marines, Air Force and Navy – were quite satisfied with it.

Not so the politicians. For years, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, a backup engine was built by a General Electric/Rolls Royce partnership because members of Congress, ever sensitive to campaign contributors, approved it despite no one in the military asking for it.

Congress finally cancelled the backup program in 2011. Same thing with a third new nuclear submarine the Navy did not request but Congress thought would be a swell idea.

The business of war is now so entrenched we mostly ignore it.

We’ve been asked to make no sacrifices for our two longest wars in history. There’s no draft taking our sons and daughters. Just an endless parade of military engagements we can’t seem to resist fueled by an unquenchable need to make ever more efficient killing machines and machinery.

So, a relative handful of folks carry signs for peace not enough of us want to see.

Maybe you’re now wondering about Michael A. Cathcart.

Army Sergeant First Class Michael A. Cathcart, a Green Beret, was killed in action in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, in November 2014, while on his second tour of duty. Sgt. Cathcart, a 31-year-old native of Bay City, earned three Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart and four Army Commendation Medals during his service.

As this is being written, Sgt. Cathcart is the last of 204 Michiganders to die in combat in Afghanistan or Iraq.

People marching for peace hope he will literally be the last. So should we.