War is… “Good for absolutely nothing”... Except for a great topic for music in the 1960’s

Edwin Starr's song against the Vietnam war carries a very blunt message. At that time, Americans were so disturbed and fed up with the war and musicians filled our airwaves more and more with anti war sentiments. The longer the wars go on, the more young people we lose. Just because the front lines are fought by the soldiers, the privates. Those are the bottom rung. They get sacrificed in the name of whatever that particular war is about. Therein lies the problem. "If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty." (O'Brien 93) This quote is portraying the the outcome of sending young soldiers to war. These soldiers that are drafted experience horror and trauma, and then come home exposed to new truths and morals. These truths that the soldiers pick up on throughout their time serving are truths that civilians cannot know and do not want to hear. When O'brien states that the soldiers come home "talking dirty", he is saying that the truth cannot be clean or easy to hear. So if the truth of war is so "dirty", then why are we fighting some of these wars? The Vietnam war, a war that had an enormous amount of opposition in this country, was all fought over a tiny strip of land on the other side of the globe. America’s safety was never at issue, yet our government felt it was so important to send tens of thousands of teenagers to their death. In the early 1990’s, we declared war on Iraq and Saddam Hussein because he was supposedly hiding weapons of mass destruction. Soldiers are sent to battle and are repeatedly subjected to terror and violence, ultimately leading a soldier's life to completely alter. Again, lives were lost, mostly young men, but no weapons of mass destruction were found. So were left to ask… what were those wars good for? Absolutely nothing.