PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON PEACE AND WAR
by William Thomas
Though I have been a student of the War Between The States for many years, I made little progress in understanding this enduring tragedy until I learned during the Gulf Eco War why someone would repeatedly risk their life in sand-drifted minefields in vain attempts to rescue oil-blinded migrating seabirds. It was not simply because imperiled innocent lives demand a response.
During America's terrible time of insurrection and retribution — and the subsequent mass murder in Vietnam — tens of thousands of young men did not repeatedly brave massed Yankee canister fire or NVA Kalashnikovs shouting their support for human bondage or international bankers. Rightly or wrongly, they risked dismemberment and death for the same reason I did: we could not desert the comrades walking beside us. In my life's ledger, Michael Bailey, Jim Thorpe and Jim Logan will always be heroes.
The late General Smedley Butler, USMC, was right. Patriotic allegiance to flag and nation is easily co-opted by venal men whose concerns are not for "freedom" or the oppressed but the obscene wealth lining their blood-filled pockets. As complicit Americans, we must abandon our stubborn addiction to war and rejoin the community of nations.
Long before Sand Creek, the butchery bystanders so blithely call "war" has been part of the American psyche since the pilgrims massacred the natives who befriended them. A Michigan boy, I graduated from a Chattanooga military academy, where we hung the Stars and Bars in our dormitory rooms and studied at desks carved with the words: "The South Shall Rise Again."
How proud and ignorant we were. The Old South's antebellum days are gone forever and no amount of nostalgia-fueled denial will revive a Lost Cause better left to American history's most sanguinary lesson. Let us pray that the New South continues its rebirth centered on racial respect and justice, peace, prosperity, American unity and those core Southern values of honor and gentility.
My ancestors fought with General Washington for American independence at Valley Forge. Another participated in the "Indian Wars" out west and died with a well-earned arrow in his back. Still another resisted what he would have termed the "Yankee invaders" at the Battle of Chickamauga. (Young Dyer survived a Northern prison hospital.) My father flew for the US Navy in the Pacific, landing his PBY in a Japanese-held lagoon under fire to save a ditched Corsair pilot, before going on as a recalled reservist to fly patrol missions over Korea. Though I broke my ancestral military mold, rebellion against government and corporate tyranny is in my blood. I also have an overactive justice gene.
Let me be crystal clear. Years ago, recognizing my circumstances and warrior propensities, I offered a special prayer to depart this life without killing anyone. It looks like I'm going to make it! Though on several occasions as a civilian I have wielded cold steel, an AK set to rock 'n' roll, and an aggressive countermove against opportunistic pirates in the South China Sea to defend myself and on that latter occasion, the courageous woman under my protection.
I have never studied martial arts. Which is why in those life-defining moments, as well as a half-dozen assaults over the years by multiple street assailants who unwisely decided to pick on the "little guy", I let my genetically-instructed body astonish us all with unhesitatingly fluid moves that left me high and trembling for hours afterwards.
(Here's the secret: If physically attacked with no opportunity to run, you must immediately put your attacker(s) down. If overmatched in size or numbers, run in close, shocking your taller opponents and encouraging them to get in each other's way, even as they are forced off-balance bending down to reach you. Then help them the rest of the way to the ground. Embarrased and winded bullies will never come at you again.)
Thank the gods, except for the much bigger camp counselor I knocked out in the desperate opening moment of a public boxing match at camp Sancta Maria many decades ago, I have never hurt any fanged animals or humans intent on doing me harm. Don't ask me how, but one dark night four startled bullies intent on teaching "that Yankee" a lesson ended up in a heap at the bottom of a grassy Tennessee slope. And with the penalty for dishonor demanding a severed finger, the hired Yakuza gangster who came after me and Hiromi in Japan likely lost more than his face after I bluffed him into a retreat long enough to ensure our escape through the rural countryside of Honshu.
For anyone who honors the divine gifts of life in themselves, their community and kin, proportionate self-defense is a sacred obligation. But whatever the excuse, enslaving others or calling distant families and ancient civilizations inferior in order to bomb their cities or napalm their villages are abominable projections beyond reason or reckoning. Which is why, though I yearned to fly from carriers since I was old enough to say, "erplane", just weeks before commencing flight training at Pensacola I realized I had no choice but to resign my USNR commission over the civilian carnage in Vietnam.
The good news is that when a cheap missile can render a flight deck unusable or bring down a two-hundred-million-dollar Triton drone or no-longe-stealthy jet, illegal wars on a whim are becoming too expensive to pursue by a country courting moral and financial collapse. Though sickened by the murderous antics of two madmen and today's senseless killing in Southwest Asia, I am heartened by the numbers of service members in the US military who are refusing illegal orders on behalf of a genocidal state. Together, dear reader, let us find peace in our hearts. And make every day a personal Appomattox of peace and reconciliation.
William Thomas
April 2026
Photo Caption
Photo of the author in Kuwait during the Gulf Eco War by Earthtrust's Michael Bailey