The Real Cost of Things

During the last week, countless stories have flooded the media, relating tales of heroism during the D-Day invasion of Normandy by the Allied Troops in World War II.  The dwindling veterans of the invasion grow smaller each year as their ages increase.  Now the teenage boys that made their way onto the French beaches approach 90, and their remaining older compatriots are well into their 90s. 

Last weekend I heard one of these nonagenarians sharing brave stories of his role as part of the lead party, conducting reconnaissance for the massive invasion, as they dodge bullets and stepped over bodies of their friends.  Another--a medic--told of stealing bandages from the dead warriors because they were the only ones remaining after the boat with medical supplies had been sunk.

One of these men related, "My wife says I've never been the same."  The words cut through me like a cold kitchen knife. 

My father was among the brave men who invaded Normandy 70 years ago this week.  I don't know what he was like before the war, but I am pretty confident that he as never the same either. 

There has never been a doubt in my mind that my father loved me totally and completely.  He was the only dad that took off work from his blue-collar job to come to special events at school.  He was there to cheer my every endeavor.  He convinced me I could be anything I wanted to be, even though I was too young to be the first woman on the Supreme Court.  Yet, just as surely as I know he loved me, I also know that there was always a distance.

My father left his heart on the beaches of Normandy, at the liberation of Paris, or  on other battlefields, just as I suspect had happened with the man in the news report on the radio.  The pain, fear, loss, anguish, or anger of the battle were too intense to deal with, so he tucked his heart away.  I doubt that it ever came out again.  He substituted other things, like attending school events on a weekday, for emotion to communicate love. 

In my mid-thirties when my husband had left me to run off with his work colleague, and I was a heap of emotion, my father was clearly distressed, but he just didn't know what to say or do.  He asked if I needed money.  I think that was the adult equivalent of attending school events on a weekday.

I don't think that we ever calculate the cost of war, and maybe that is a good thing.  It was important to stop the Nazis in World War II, and if we had really considered the costs, maybe we wouldn't have jumped in.  Most of a generation of men divorced themselves of emotion.  The man I adopted as a dad after my own father died told me of still being haunted by the war well into his 80s.  Many of them were never able to be emotionally available to their children, who became a generation to play with sex and drugs to experience a substitute feeling.

It wasn't just emotions that didn't come home.  Some left limbs on the battlefield.  A man at our church was so badly scarred from a wartime explosion that it was hard to tell what he looked like.  In whispers people said he used to be very handsome. 

But World War II wasn't our most costly war. During the Civil War, 620,000 people died.  Many more lost limbs, hearing and sight. 

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the new name for what was called shell shock in World War I.  Men, who for the first time were victims of modern warfare, had no way to have prepared for that horror.  My grandfather spent 25 years in a mental institution from his war's PTSD. 

The most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen men and women, who probably would have died in an earlier time, come home without limbs...or the dreaded PTSD or traumatic head injuries from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs.) Had we really calculated these costs, would we not have been able to predict the impact on our Veterans Administration health system. 

War takes other tolls, too.  Whole generations of young men die. Beautiful masterpieces of architecture lie in rubble.  Looters take off with museum pieces that have been cared for lovingly for millennia.  Perhaps a collective amnesia cripples our thinking as we contemplate war. 

There are a lot of things that we don't calculate the real cost of.  War is just one of them.  Do people carrying an extra 30 pounds really calculate the costs of those extra pounds, in both years lost and additional medical costs incurred?  Do people who get that bargain shirt for $10 at Wal-Mart calculate the real cost of that garment? Do those who smoke a pack a day realize the costs of their habits? Do people who choose factory-farmed beef for dinner realize the cost to our environment?

It seems to me that the real cost of things is rarely reflected on the price tag.  If it were, we would probably all choose to spend differently for things so dear.