The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are our longest and third longest duration wars for the United States and yet few Americans have been personally touched by them. While our second longest war, Viet Nam, was fought with draftees, these two current wars are being fought using a very scaled down, all volunteer military. This leads to the general public viewing these wars as out of sight, out of mind.

Now that I am back in NC, I am participating once again with our local Peace Vigil every Saturday from noon to 1 pm. This is their 13th year and will be my third year with them. There are times when we have some good conversations and other times when it is just hellos and waving. We had good traffic this past Saturday and one man in his mid to late fifties stopped. The first thing he asked us was what kind of reception do we get from the public. Since I have been involved, the reception we get is generally positive but according to Bill and Don, in the early days it was not so. The man then introduced himself and said that his father had been a career military officer in the Marines. I thought to myself...oh no! Then he said that his father had served in both the Korean War and in Viet Nam and that he hated war.

Actually I should not have been surprised. I had once read somewhere that most military officers want to do everything they can to keep their men out of harm's way, so I asked him about that. He said that was true of old school military men like his father, but he did not know if that was the case today. And then he said one more thing that all of us in the Peace Vigil have been saying for a long time, and that is that his father strongly believed in the draft with no exceptions. He felt that if everyone's children or grandchildren would have the potential to be put in harm's way, that decision makers of this country would be far less enthusiastic about entering more wars. As a result of that comment, I decided to find out how many members of the current House and Senate have ever served in the military. It was a surprisingly low 18% of all Congress have ever served in the military at all, much less in combat, and of that number, only 13% of the Senate.

In all, 97 members of the next session of Congress will have served in the U.S. military. That means less than 18 percent of the new congressional delegation served in the armed forces. (Note: This number includes one non-voting delegate from the Northern Marianas.)

As I was writing this, I did a search for information on how the military itself views these endless wars and came across this excellent article in the Atlantic. I found this one fact very interesting. It may explain why we are so accepting of our elected officials plunging us into war after war.

The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.

We supposedly honor our military by "thanking them for their service," which I personally find to be an empty and hypocritical gesture aimed at making the person saying it feel better about him or herself, than it is about why are we sending these few people into combat time after time with no real military objective in these endless wars.

The most biting satirical novel to come from the Iraq-Afghanistan era, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, is a takedown of our empty modern “thank you for your service” rituals. It is the story of an Army squad that is badly shot up in Iraq; is brought back to be honored at halftime during a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game; while there, is slapped on the back and toasted by owner’s-box moguls and flirted with by cheerleaders, “passed around like everyone’s favorite bong,” as platoon member Billy Lynn thinks of it; and is then shipped right back to the front.

Our relationship to those whom we send into combat is very much at a distance which is why so many Americans seem to have no problem with the endless wars. We no longer have skin in the game. Our wars are being fought with someone else's kids and grandkids. A large number of Americans do not personally know anyone who has fought in these wars.

For two decades after World War II, the standing force remained so large, and the Depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most Americans had a direct military connection. Among older Baby Boomers, those born before 1955, at least three-quarters have had an immediate family member—sibling, parent, spouse, child—who served in uniform. Of Americans born since 1980, the Millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience.

The draft for the Viet Nam war touched nearly every American in that we all knew or were related to someone who served. It was hard to ignore the war because it was personal to most Americans. Nowadays, that simply is not the case for the majority of Americans.

These endless wars are the most visible result of the corruption in our government and they have very tragic consequences, both in the countries that we have devastated and here in the United States.

Editors note: This diary was originally written as an open thread so if the comments appear to be off topic, that is the reason.