Standing on the Hills We Won't Die On

A piece by guest author Elvis the Gator

In the Vietnam War, the United States Armed Forces designated different hills with numbers corresponding to their height. These served as key terrain on the battlefield, and many engagements — like the one on Hill 937, which became known as the Battle of Hamburger Hill — took place on or within their vicinity. After taking a hill, U.S. forces would remain on it for a few days, and, after killing or flushing out the enemy from the area, they would leave.

And after what might be months, weeks, or even days, they would return, like Sisyphus, to do it again.

The strategy was criticized, of course, but numerically speaking, the casualties inflicted on the enemy in these battles were far greater than the U.S. ever received. With attrition being the overall manner by which the war was being conducted, those in command of U.S. forces considered these decisive victories.

And while the exceptional West Point-educated colonel patted himself on the back, your average Kentucky-born-and-bred farm boy lay nursing wounds in a military aid station, soon joined by one of his compatriots the next time this operation was run — assuming that he came back at all.

It’s a tale as old as war itself: clever old men sending the young and strong to perish in gruesome and repetitive ways. And yet, remarkably, it still seems uniquely heinous to me. Why?

While many lost their lives in a literal sense on these hills, these hills were never, in a figurative sense, hills we were willing to die on regarding America’s imperial crusade in Southeast Asia.

As we have seen time and time again, this has been the pattern of American foreign policy: the expansion of an empire into places we have no business being and, after decades of blood and treasure spent, places we have the audacity to leave like an empty husk after a crab has molted from its shell.

We find ourselves doing it again, more cleverly and with fewer casualties, to the point where, in the past decade in Syria, we have suffered fewer casualties than in any previous conflict, and we have suffered none in our material support of Ukraine.

As the Middle East explodes and devolves into chaos with an intergenerational ethnic conflict that, one could argue, goes back to the rift between the two sons of Abraham, we seem poised to continue our new imperial project — our democracy, for all mankind — or else.

The cultural zeitgeist has already turned its attention to the new installment of Current Thing, Inc., with the usual neoliberal and neocon suspects — including ones who denounced our involvement in Ukraine — suddenly sporting a form of blood-and-soil nationalism heretofore forbidden to exist within America’s now very open borders.

Nobody is, of course, surprised to see people tweet out “I stand for [party of choice],” and we all know that that stand they make is, once again, on a hill they won’t die on.

While most are still optically savvy enough to include the obligatory “I wish no violence on innocent civilians, women, and children,” no small number have come to sound like George Lucas’s awful dialogue come to life — excusing or even cheering the butchering of the opposition regardless.

And this is not some edgelord-posting designed to invoke a dark and twisted laugh, or even a thinly veiled attempt to use that dark humor as cover. Awful as this all might be, if I am to attempt to find any light in this abyss, it starts with a simple but hard introspection, one the commanders in Vietnam never asked of themselves:

• What hill do we — do I — What hill do you stand on, that you are willing to die on?

• My nation? My blood? My faith? My city? My community? Only myself?

• Am I beholden to real people? Or abstract principles? Am I allegiant to my religious upbringing — or Christ Himself?

Identity is not self-constructed — and in an atomized world, it often feels like a frame we have with no painting.

The hour may soon be upon us all, or is coming for us individually, when we are faced with a calamity — brought on by the power of the sword. And as much as we might like to think, no pen is mightier than the sword in the hand of one who refuses to read.

We have seen those in the progressive religion, as evil and twisted as it might be, fashion themselves into pseudo-martyrs rather than admit obvious truths. We may count it as stupidity or courage, neither or both — but whatever it is, they were captured and possessed by the Spirit of the Age.

And with Pax Americana clearly ended (assuming it actually existed in the first place), we are now watching the Sauron of our security state turn its flame-wreathed eye onto those same Kentucky boys it sent to die on hills in Vietnam and Afghanistan — all for the crime of rejecting the state and its religion, whose true banner is flown throughout the month of June.

And yet, even as their ever-watchful eye turns on us, I can’t help but think of how that work of fiction to which I allude brought forth an answer to these questions.

For the Ringbearer was not alone, but had one with him — someone of shared experience, belief, and community, with whom some heritage was shared, even if their individual stations separated them. The Shire was a particular place of, and for, a particular people — people he knew, whom he lived not just among, but with, and belonged to.

Neither compatriot died on that terrible Mount Doom, although the sacrifices made changed them forever. But even if they had literally died, where they died figuratively was where they stood — on the rolling hills of a place called The Shire. And while it may be hard to find one (assuming there is one for each of us to find at all), you can always start to build one, so that your children will not have to climb up the same mountain of fire as you.

For what good there is in this life we can only find in a Shire, a place where we are more the same than we are different, where simple pleasures of hearth and home are valued more than fortune and glory, where virtue is favored over vice — not just in name but in practice.