Each day in America as late morning approaches, families of service members stationed in the Middle East probably grow nervous as nightfall nears seven time zones away. On military bases or aircraft carriers, pilots are fueling up and taking off for missions over Iran. In countries across both sides of the Persian Gulf, civilians await the terror of missiles and bombs whistling through the darkness.
Back home a mother worries about her son in his plane.A spouse, with a young child, worries about their service member while balancing the everyday stresses of holding a family together. At night the seriousness of war emerges and the distant drumbeats pound amid the silence.
All those miles away, United States service members, both women and men, have already been wounded or killed. And all those miles away, missiles and bombs fall on innocent people, young and old, who have nothing to do with the ambitions or geopolitics of people half a world away.
In America we have an administration posting videos on social media platforms with clips from movies, video games and animated films. Thirty second clips, based in fantasy with high-energy music, used to both justify and excite the base for war. “Epic Fury” warfare is being packaged with a slick name and social media clips like influencers trying to sell us clothes or drinks or vacation destinations.
It is a calculated sales job that is disrespectful to the solemn conduct of war.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power. I hope that we understand that the less we use our power the stronger it will be.” Over two centuries later, the use of war power is made easier because we’ve walled off a segment of our population from the actual costs. But if we look, there are reminders everywhere.
The words written in The Gettysburg Compiler on July 7, 1863 should still haunt us: “Every name…is a lightning stroke to some heart and breaks like thunder over some home, and falls a long black shadow over some hearthstone.”
There is an incredibly powerful scene in the movie “Saving Private Ryan.” A mother of four World War II soldiers is busy in her kitchen doing the routine tasks of an ordinary day. We see a U.S. Army car driving up the winding dusty lane to her farmhouse and we know the men in that car carry devastating news that three of her sons have been killed. Her head is down as she washes dishes in the sink, so she doesn’t look out the window to see what we see.
In her reality, her sons will all remain alive until that car arrives. But with that approach, that moment will forever change everything in her life. How you wish that car never arrived.
As her dogs bark, she looks up and sees the car make its final turn toward her house. Her face reveals a reluctant and tragic understanding that something horrible is coming. She walks quietly to the door, opens the screen door as the officers’ car comes to a stop. As a chaplain gets out with the officers, she falls to her knees on the front porch without a word.
This is the reality of war.
Years after our wars, names are engraved in stone or cast in bronze on memorials in small towns and big cities marking our history. In towns like Bedford, Bellefonte, Boalsburg, Tyrone or on campus at Penn State we see them. The people who carried these names are largely lost to history, but their names represent lives cut short by the horrors of real war, rather than an alternate reality of slick imagery.
A man named Alexander Russell, killed just nine days before the end of World War I is remembered in Boalsburg. In Bellefonte, Alexander Green’s name appears for his Civil War service as a member of what was then known as the 6th U.S. Colored Regiment. At Penn State Lt. Michael Murphy’s name is remembered for his ultimate sacrifice just over 20 years ago in Afghanistan. These men were taken in the days of youth, when, but for the waging of wars, their futures of possibility seemed to extend before them.
All wars represent a failure of humanity. Whether the wars were just or not, it no longer matters to these individual soldiers lost. Their loss struck sorrow in the hearts of friends and families, people left wondering what if, and what it all meant.
War is tragic for others too. Innocent civilian casualties are no less tragic, and the long black shadow also falls on their hearthstone. No memorial will bear their names, and we dismiss their deaths all too easily.
The slick packaging of war, the dehumanization of people who do not look like us or worship like us allows us to go on accepting and cheering propagandized marketing campaigns. We even have a sanitized way to describe the death of innocents using words like “collateral damage.”
Through the noise, bots on social media hammer home the “patriotic” imagery. The videos of missiles striking targets become a voyeuristic source of entertainment. But that is our world in 2026. Everything is about selling “the brand” from consumer products to entertainment to war.
Nothing could be more dishonest or disrespectful to the people that are truly in harm’s way. The people who serve this nation and innocent people on the ground are caught in a crossfire stoked by small people with big egos who find it all too easy to order planes, soldiers, bombs and missiles into “action.” They rain destruction and death on our fellow human beings.
But back home, there are families for whom the potential cost of war goes much further than higher gas prices.
As people of faith in this country, we pray that the means of war be employed sparingly and only in the cause of what is just after all other serious attempts at good faith diplomacy are exhausted. One hopes that the people in power come to a more respectful understanding and portrayal of the horrible power of war. False bravado is the refuge of cowards.
Tonight, as the bombs fall, man’s inhumanity to man continues. The lights of explosions in the dark flash to expose the terror in the eyes of those trampled under the hooves of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: War, Death, Famine and Conquest.
And somewhere a stone cutter is sharpening his tools, and bad news may be making its way to the home of a mother or a spouse. And innocents are crushed under the weight of a war waged by others.
That is the reality of war.
