War, Reality, and The Hobbit

Of all books stacked upon her nightstand, my wife chose Odysseus in America, a psychological book dealing with combat trauma and trial of a soldier's homecoming, all through the lens of the great Greek hero, Odysseus. It is often assigned at the War College.

Many of the book's insights (mediated through my wife) have synced up with my own experience. More important, the book is transforming the way my wife thinks about war and even her interpretation of the whole of human experience.

My wife now "gets it." I never gave her an inside peak at the Army lifestyle before I deployed, nor did she feel able to enter into it as she simply tried to survive during the deployment. But there is so much more to war than most people realize, and that's the biggest gap that exists between those who have gone to war and those who have perceived it from afar.

War may be a simple symptom of a broken world, where rivalry, pride, and greed slip the bounds of the community and entangle nations and peoples, or it may be a "necessary evil," that is utilized by just nations to maintain a degree of peace and order (as a measure of God's common grace). In either case, whether just or not, war is irretrievably a part of the human experience.

It rips the shroud off of illusions of invincibility and insulation. It forces us to look at the costs of a broken world and the human sacrifice often necessitated to restrain the chaos. It litters the streets of Boston with limbs introduces flag-draped coffins on the evening news. We flee from war like a boy who flees from a girl with cooties, but eventually, she catches us all. We cannot escape her.

But alongside the more grisly realities of a broken world and corrupted human nature, war also introduces us to beautiful (even if tragic) themes concerning the real world. We live in a world where men will willingly go off to war in order to protect their homes and loved ones. We live in a world where one man will fall upon a grenade for the person next to him without a second thought. We live in a world where those who take such a mantle upon their shoulders receive their praise.

And when we understand these things, we interpret the world anew. My wife never like the Lord of the Rings movies, but she was mesmerized the other night while watching The Hobbit. Why? She could understand why this pack of dwarfs were willing to follow a leader they believed in, for a cause that they believed in (home), alongside beloved friends that they believed in. She got it.

(As an aside, that is why you can criticize the policies or opinions of a war time president, but not his motives or his character. The leader of soldiers embodies the morality of their cause. Those who ignorantly argued that "Bush lied, people died" or level similar attacks upon President Obama are undermining the leaders or our soldiers and thus undermining the soldiers themselves.)

Bilbo finally confesses, late in the first movie, that the reason he was willing to leave his beloved Shire was so that, in essence, his friends could return to their beloved mountain. We will give up so very much to maintain the peace and prosperity of our home, as well as for our friends.

And since my wife now "gets it," she not only appreciated a more "masculine" movie, but appreciated the mind behind it. J.R.R. Tolkien served in the trenches in WWI. He was withdrawn for health reasons just before most of his unit was wiped out. He later stated that every friend of his but one was killed in that war. Those experiences profoundly affect a man. You can see them at work in his writing: the beauty of hearth and home, the grim duty of leaving to protect it, the deep bonds of platonic love, the grisly necessity of war, and the beauty that can follow the ashes.

At the end of Lord of the Rings, Frodo travels to a distant paradise, leaving behind a Shire that was worth protecting, but now unfamiliar to him. There too, we find the young soldier, Tolkien, and every soldier who comes back from war. They fought for a world they no longer belong to. Some can carry on like Samwise, with their own Rosy Cotton and handful of kids; others look with longing to a future life without tears. A handful will do both, finding in Christ, their hope and home, the strength and meaning to pass through this vale of tears.