No End of Fried Chicken — STEVEN HARDESTY

Robert E. Lee was a traitor and a slaver but there’s one story about him I enjoy retelling because it’s any soldier’s story and I was a soldier once.

Lee, riding along the trenches to check the dispositions of his army during Grant’s siege of Richmond/Petersburg in 1864, met two ladies in a buggy out to sightsee his army.

“General,” they said to him, “what do you hope to do after we win the war?” Thinking, no doubt, that he would reply, Become president of the Confederacy.

But Lee got a dreamy look in his eyes and said, “I want to eat fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two fried chickens. I want no end of fried chicken!”

No end of fried chicken.

That’s what every soldier wants. In Ukraine and in Russia. In my war in Vietnam. Standing against the enemy hordes at Chosin Reservoir. Grinding over the Nazis in Patton’s tanks.

Because a soldier doesn’t want war. Oh, sure, he or she trains for war all across a twenty or thirty year military career. But in all those years s/he is likely to go to just one war. And once s/he sees war, once is enough.

For more of war’s hard truth, read “The Heart Attack” from page 49.

The TV news that brings the Ukraine war into our homes every hour presents plenty of horror but it does not show the real war that a soldier must live. No, real war is what you read on the grim front pages of newspapers from places like Uvalde, Texas – parents stunned and weeping at the massacre of their children in their school classrooms. Little bodies torn to pieces by automatic rifle fire. Children dying in pain and surprise. Dying in fading hope of rescue. Stunned, puzzled, wretched.

Soldiers this hour standing on distant frontlines to protect this country must look back at Uvalde and wonder, What am I protecting if we massacre our own children?

A soldier may want no end of fried chicken. But today he or she craves something more – a country with the courage to stop making war on its own children. A country worth the soldier’s protection and risk. Worth the soldier’s staring into the awful face of war abroad.

We need to measure up, we need to stand up like soldiers. Admit that the frontline is here within ourselves. That we may be defenders of this nation but we are its besiegers, too. And then do what must be done to reshape ourselves and re-form this country and stop making war on our children.