Afghanistan and our puzzlement about war

Isn't Afghanistan turning into something like a bad dream? Weren't the old Soviets painted as evil for "invading" and fighting there? Shouldn't we fear that there's truth behind the saying that "Afghanistan is where empires go to die?"
Just because there's historical precedent, does that mean we have to follow it? Don't Americans in their 50s and 60s know full well how a military venture like this can turn into a tragic sinkhole (like Viet Nam)?
Why is it that the American war narrative has never really seemed the same since the end of World War Two? The Second World War has come to be known as "the good war." That war was of course horrific and deadly for countless people.
Americans saw the need to rise up and assert their inherent goodness, cultivated through the opening of a virgin continent, and stomp out naked evil. The narrative seemed so clear and non-nuanced. And the atomic bomb was developed just in time to apply a decisive exclamation point.
It has never been the same since. How we would like to see the American military engage and prevail in story lines like in WWII movies of the mid 20th Century. Robert Mitchum might be the leading actor. Mitchum gained fame and presumably great riches telling the story of U.S. trial and triumph in "the good war."
We were supposed to feel moved at the end of "The Longest Day" when the Mitchum character briefly took his attention off all that was going on around him to sniff a cigar up and down before lighting it up. A who's who of stars was in that movie. It seemed ironic to be entertained by such an historical episode out of hell. Tom Hanks insisted on a less sanitized version for "Saving Private Ryan."
What kind of soldier would Robert Mitchum have been, or Hanks? Hollywood is known as "the dream factory" for a reason. I wrote a couple months ago how Hollywood can take dangerous wild animals and make them seem charming and innocent on screen. The prime example was the chimpanzee. My writing at that time was inspired by the mysterious black bear that wandered into Morris. I don't think we've ever been told the whole story about that bear - where it came from or its fate.
In that sense our local corporate media may have become a "dream factory." Pure citizen journalism could have pulled down any curtain.
Hollywood has taken an event that was straight out of hell - the D-Day invasion - and crafted well-known movies from it. The violence is offset by our impulse to cheer for "the good guys."
The impulse is never so strong as when we view Pacific Theater movies that show our revenge objective in the wake of the barbarous Pearl Harbor "ambush." The definitive movie here is "Tora Tora Tora." Again we see entertainment crafted from an unspeakably horrible event.
But the narrative of our inherent goodness and inevitability of triumph was impressed on us further. In this sense we were entertained in the same way as with the older cowboys-and-Indians movies. There are parallels in these narratives, not perfect but detectable.
A less civilized, non-white force would commit a barbarous act only to be overwhelmed by "the cavalry" at the pivotal moment. Cowboys vs. Indians was a long-lasting genre in our "dream factory."
Was this a whole lot different from Pearl Harbor and how America subsequently rolled over the enemy? The narrative was satisfying on screen and in reminiscences, fitting comfortable American (and Anglo-Saxon) parameters. The ultimate triumph was something we could count on. The mysterious enemy would fade.
Then along came Korea and the parameters started getting a little muddied. Any doubt was removed by Viet Nam.
In dribs and drabs we have tried, desperately really, to rationalize that current events can fit the old narrative. Exhibit 'A' would be the first Gulf War in which our media and pop culture obsessed as if to re-create WWII itself. All this was embodied in how Whitney Houston sang the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.
But I think we all had subconscious doubts about that interpretation. We were fighting soldiers who couldn't surrender fast enough. Much of it was like a turkey shoot. And we basically left Iraq intact. That bothered the son of the president, who eventually became president himself - he had learned the racket - and pursued his grudge.
The jury is still out on the Iraq War. The sheer cost of that war is weighing on us now. Saddam Hussein was probably nothing more than a regional nuisance. The media made him larger than life and created a portrait of the quintessential villain - yes, non-white - which I would argue would do Hollywood proud.
Once this "badness" was identified we had to eradicate it just like our cavalry once did. But real life is messy and can be tragic. America's enemies have learned how to not just be bowled over. We cannot engage in nation-building, or if we do, lots of humility awaits. Our economy cannot sustain it. Even columnist George Will feels this way.
The old narrative of America spreading good as if by whim isn't practical anymore. We must be vigilant but we can't just swarm the beaches with landing craft. We must strive to understand cultures different than ours and to make compromises in a complicated world.
We have a non-white president which I think is profoundly troubling to a lot of people. They won't say it, and the media shies away from this theory. But there's an undertone of racism in the incessant drumbeat of criticism from the right wing in America. It's dangerous, maybe just as dangerous as the shadowy enemies outside our borders.
It stands in the way of consensus-building that is such an important ingredient in our stability. I might even suggest that God might punish us for this.
There was consensus after Pearl Harbor and the Nazi conquests in Europe. Nothing could have stopped us. I'm reminded of John Wayne in "The Longest Day" bellowing "send 'em to hell!" - a line that at the time pushed the envelope a bit.
I remember seeing "The Longest Day" at our Morris Theater. Movies like this spawned war toys and backyard war games that in retrospect seem weird and troubling. Faux hand grenades that worked with cap gun caps?
Did our parents just blot it out or were they being indulgent with their precious "baby boomers?" They knew full well the hell of war.
World War Two is now receding further into the past. Clinging to that narrative as something meaningful for the present is getting harder, perhaps impossible.
Defeating the bad guys doesn't seem to work like it used to. Conflicts are more nuanced and with enemies that are shadowy and difficult to understand. The enemy that we are fighting in Afghanistan has largely re-deployed into Pakistan.
Author Tom Engelhardt would argue that Afghanistan is continuing the "triumphalist despair" that has befallen us ever since the Hiroshima bomb. Engelhardt wrote a book, copyrighted in 1995, called "The End of Victory Culture - Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation."
I read nearly the whole book but I'll quote from the jacket where we can cut to the chase. This book is "an autopsy of a once vital American myth: the cherished belief that triumph over a less-than-human enemy was in the American grain, a birthright and a national destiny."
Engelhardt provides "a compelling account of how a national narrative of triumph through which Americans had always sustained themselves as a people underwent a vertiginous decomposition from Hiroshima to Viet Nam."
That was a span of just 20 years - Hiroshima to Viet Nam.
Now it's Afghanistan. And the end doesn't look pretty.
Why don't we just leave? But I would have said that in 1965 regarding Viet Nam.
-Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com