War is good for absolutely nothing

It's interesting how whole of Portsmouth is buzzing with upcoming D-Day celebrations. Celebrating the war is something that Finns just don't do, maybe it's because losers don't celebrate. In here though, it's a yearly event: D-Day, or something else, I don't usually pay that much attention to it.

Why is it then that this time I notice my thoughts keep coming back to it? It could be because there is a war going at the moment that distresses me and makes it more real, or that the celebrations are this time actually happening in a city that I live in and are affecting my life in practical ways. Also thoughts about the book Dragon's mother has just written are lingering in my head. In any case, I've been thinking about my grandfathers: I'm lucky as I've grown up with both of them - they both went to war but returned alive and well to raise families and grandchildren.

I remember when I was a kid riding on my grandfather's shoulders, I used to wonder about funny bumps on his head. I was told that they were grenade fragments he got in the war and that they couldn't be removed. It meant nothing to me of course - I learned to repeat the words, but I had very little understanding what grenades were, or even what war meant. Also, the war was never talked about at home, and neither of my grandfathers never mentioned it, not when I was present anyway. I don't think it was a taboo or anything like that, but it was just never a topic - and it's unlikely it would have interested me as a kid anyway.

But lately I've been thinking about that more. My grandfather is now practically deaf from one ear - this is a result of being posted as a gunner during the war - so he didn't really escape without injuries as I had thought when I was younger. I also keep thinking about the fact that to get grenade fragments on his skull he must have been really close to the action - in fact the thought that he might have been very close to losing his life is bewildering.

So my feelings about WWII veterans have changed - but maybe not to the direction of "they fought for our indipendence" that is the usual way they are put on a pedestal. But in a way of better understanding the horrors that they went trough - I was listening to a veteran talking about D-Day and how ever since that he's every year returned to the battle field to honour his fallen friends, and it brought tears to my eyes... something that would have never happened before.

When WWII ended, and all the horrors started to surface, the whole world was adamant that this would be the final war to end all wars. None of the people who were involved ever wanted to go trough anything like that again and for a long time there was (relative) peace on earth. I've been formulating a thought in my head about GWB, and his passion for war, and I think that one of the reasons he's so bloodthirsty is the fact that he's never experienced an actual war, or any effects from it.

We're now living in an age where all the people who actually took part in the previous world war are so old their stories are being forgotten... Or maybe that's not true - maybe the words are known, but they are just being repeated over and over again without understanding of their meaning, like I was doing as a kid. I'm just hoping that if nothing else good comes out of the war in Iraq and the recently exposed prisoner abuse, at least it will make some people undertstand what going to war means.

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