While I’m sure that W+Co would love to have the war in the Middle East metastasize and essentially last forever, there is such a thing as finite resources, and either the occupation of Iraq will end soon, or we will find ourselves sending an significant chunk of an entire generation to their needless deaths, and throwing away taxpayer money to the point where our infrastructure will start to suffer. (I imagine that Hurricane Katrina is only a foreshadowing. And keep in mind that we have yet to institute any actualy measures that would keep us safe from terrorist attacks.)

Not unexpectedly, a good number of the people who are invested in the idea of Eternal War™ fought in past conflicts, and have moved on to bigger and better things—namely, fighting as mercenaries security contractors (the most prominent of these involved in the war in Iraq being Blackwater USA)

Which always leads to the (literarily) interesting question as to what happens to soldiers once their tour of duty is over. The violence of war marks people out from normal people. People who have never killed anyone find it hard to relate to people who have.

Obviously, my take on the matter is exceedingly biased, since I regularly work with veterans who are suffering from the sequelae of armed conflict. In my eyes, it seems like very few people make it out of war unscathed. Lots of people make it through without physical harm, but not too many make it through without psychological harm. I need to meet folks who have been through Operation Iraqi Freedom and who have been able to successfully integrate back into society.

The reason why all this comes to mind is that I found myself watching a bizarre trilogy of otherwise unrelated films. The first was “Under Siege” starring Steven Seagal, but also featuring Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Busey, Erika Eleniak, and Colm Meaney (you’ll know who he is if you’ve watched too much “Star Trek”) Steven Seagal is an ex-Navy SEAL who now works as a cook. Jones, Busey, and Meaney are part of a cadre of mercenaries (Jones plays a guy who is ex-CIA, and Busey is a corrupt Commander.) Their goal is to take over a Navy Battleship and sell its armaments on the black market.

The second movie was “Commando” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (the Governator himself), Rae Dawn Chong, and Alyssa Milano, where Schwarzenegger plays an ex-Army Special Forces soldier whose daughter (played by Alyssa Milano) is kidnapped in order to convince Schwarzenegger to go down to South America to assasinate a head-of-state. Naturally, Schwarzenegger finds a way out of his predicament and tears off to save his daughter by blowing-up and/or killing anyone who gets in his way. (I still can’t get used to the fact that this guy is governor of California. I mean, it’s really weird.)

The third movie was “Serenity”, the culmination of the short-lived science-fiction series “Firefly”. Judging from the wikipedia entries about Joss Whedon’s universe, it seems to be an analog to the post-American Civil War period, i.e., Reconstruction. The behemoth central government is called the Alliance, echoing the Union (and perhaps subtlely co-opting the association with forces of Good™ first fomented by the Allies of WWII, and solidified in George Lucas’ use of the Rebel Alliance.) Much like the modern-day U.S., while the agents of the Alliance are for the most part attempting to be benevolent, they nevertheless require the exploitation of the peripheral systems (read, the Western Frontier, or perhaps even the developing world) in order to continue the lifestyle to which citizens of the Alliance find themselves accustomed to. And the Alliance is not chary of using black-ops to achieve their objectives.

Two of the crew members of the ship are veterans of the Unification War (read, the American Civil War) and they were on the losing side. With the collapse of the Independent Systems (read, the Confederacy) and resultant absorption into the Alliance, they are forced to eke out a subsistence existence, freighting cargo and transporting passangers. The plot of the movie hinges upon unintended blowback from Alliance attempts at social engineering, and the ensuing attempts to cover-up the incidents reawakens the characters’ antagonism to the Alliance. (Interestingly, some viewers have interpreted the mindlessly violent Reavers as Native Americans. In my own reading, the implication is that like the Reavers, the indigenous people were not innately violent, but the ensuing colonization and social engineering caused a push-back effect. The analogy is extremely awkward, but one could argue that as the Union continued to expand, they forced the indigenous people further and further away from their ancestral lands, and this naturally resulted in increasing hostility and violence against the usurpers. However, one cannot really ascribe a similar phenomenon amongst the Reavers, except their origins are an excellent example of blowback—unintentional negative consequences from attempting to do good, not unlike the ruinous attempt to subjugate the Iraqi people under a “democracy”, resulting in increasing violence.)

(Unfortunately, this interpretation hinges too much on the concepts of the “white man’s burden” and/or the “noble savage,” which are diametrically-opposed oversimplifications of the plight of the indigenous. Interestingly, the wikipedia article on “Serenity” notes the Shakespearean allusions, specifically to The Tempest. From this work comes the phrase “brave new world,” which was the basis of the title of Aldous Huxley’s technodystopian novel, and which, naturally, features a character only known as The Savage, who embodies the stereotype of the noble savage entirely.)

So what will be the Fate of the soldiers who are fighting this futile war?