Russia will need another Tolstoy to write about Putin's war on Ukraine

Odd in 2022 to be rooting for an underdog European country against a maniacal dictator bent on war.

Seems like 1939. Not that I experienced it first-hand -- I didn’t arrive on this planet for another 11 years. In that span, World War II began and ended and other wars erupted. One maniacal dictator was defeated and another one rose. We can’t get rid of these guys. Face it, almost all are guys. In America’s zeal to blunt Stalin, Khrushchev, etc., we waged war in Vietnam and sponsored dozens of proxy wars in Latin America. We jumped into Korea. My father, a World War II veteran who only returned to the States in 1946, faced a call-up for Korea just when he was celebrating the birth of his first child, me. He wasn’t called up but wondered in a letter: “I thought they gave us 20 years between wars?”

They do, as it turned out. His father fought in The War To End All Wars (TWTEAW) and 23 years later, Dad enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the early 1960s, the U.S. waged war in Vietnam with “advisors” and, just a few years later, draftees were being flown to Ton Son Nhut. I wasn’t one of them, thankfully, but many were, reluctantly going overseas to fight yet another war. Twenty years later, we were in Southwest Asia to fight Saddam and back again 10 years later to fight Saddam and Osama and the Taliban. We were in Afghanistan 20 years.

War never ends. Each generation gets it taste and a generation later elects warmakers that send their sons and daughters off to be killed in a foreign land.

So it goes.

After living through that history, I find it ironic that I cheer on the Ukrainians. In my head, I watch the coverage and say in my head, “Kill the Russians.” I don’t say it out loud but the sentiment is there, floating around the ether. Putin is the bad guy here and we try to stop him with economic sanctions and solidarity with NATO countries. It may work. But what happens if Putin uses chemical weapons or nukes? We have to respond. Kill the Russians! I say it although I know that it's young conscripts and civilians doing the dying while Putin plays Risk in his bunker. 

Inside of me is the part that read Chekhov and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I remember Tolstoy’s writing about his horrific experiences as a Russian officer in the Caucasus campaign ("Hadji Murat") and Crimean War ("Sevastopol Sketches"). In the Caucasus, Chechens waged a guerrilla war against Russian troops. They responded by torching the forests so the enemy had no place to hide and decimating villages that lent aid to the guerrillas (sound familiar?). Says one of Tolstoy's Chechen fighters returning to his burnt-out village:

“Nobody spoke about hatred towards the Russians. What they all felt, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but an unwillingness even to acknowledge these Russian dogs as people.”

The Crimean War spawned Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” that I once had to memorize in detention at Catholic School. It also brought ministrations of Florence Nightingale to our attention. It was as bloody as the one in Chechnya and Tolstoy described his vanity and that of his fellow officers this way:

“A thousand human self-images managed to be offended, a thousand managed to be awfully pleased, to puff themselves up, and a thousand – to find their rest within the arms of death.”

Maybe there’s a Tolstoy among the troops assaulting Mariupol or closing in on Kyiv. Someone who goes off to war in high spirits but comes home in tatters.