It wasn’t that long ago in US history when men and women returning home after risking life and limb in Vietnam would find themselves confronting misguided hatred and anger, as hippies and hypocritical pacifists took every opportunity to antagonize, harass and assault our men and women in uniform.  Today, a consensus has been formed in US society where the burden of blame is shifted to our policy makers, rather than our soldiers who are simply doing their best to follow their commander in chief.  That’s great for soldiers today, but for soldiers of the previous era, the assault on their very being by the people they supposedly protected is still an open sore that perhaps will never heal.  Sadly, we as a nation have done nothing to hold accountable all those hypocritical hippie pacifists who have wronged our soldiers, nay, our nation so badly.  Ask any of them today and they will sheepishly turn away, insisting that all that was in the past.  Rather convenient for them, but still at some point those people should get their day of reckoning.

It is tragic then, to witness the same phenomenon occurring in Germany, where men and women who serve in Afghanistan are treated to the same evil that the American soldiers saw back during the Vietnam war.  Unlike in the US, where people go out of their way to thank the troops, buying them beer when they can, in Germany, the troops are explicitly being told by their own populace to make themselves scarce or face assault.

At best, German troops mixing in with the general populace are ignored, with people pretending they aren’t there, or, should an encounter be unavoidable, they get treated with contempt.  At worse, there are elements of the general population who actively harass and assault them, akin to what the militant pacifists, yes those hypocrites, would do in the US back in the 60s and 70s.

Heike Groos, a German military doctor in Afghanistan explains that “this sense of appreciation, you don’t get that” and she writes that “young people are badly wounded and one feels out of place and lonely when one thinks, ‘no one in Germany understands and no one in Germany is even interested.’”  Sadly, the disgrace of the Nazi regime has completely castrated the German populace, to the point where they begin fighting the wrong fight: instead of channeling their anger towards those who might challenge the German way of life, they instead channel their anger towards those who are fighting to ensure that their way of life remains unmolested.

The Germans have experienced peace for quiet for some time now, with the umbrella of NATO guaranteeing its survival, so it’s not hard to imagine how a common brain would fail to see that peace and prosperity is not the norm, and that it takes a lot of work and sacrifice to keep it that way.  Including a just, armed conflict.  The common German would argue that the military is an unnecessary evil, and so it treats it that way.  Regretfully, these common Germans fail to learn from history; that is, no peace  is sustainable unless you have a force to actively ensure it.

Hard as it is to imagine now, conflict is rather a constant threat, and a nation needs to manage that conflict to ensure that it does not end up inside its borders, where it could become a threat to that nation’s way of life.  The German soldiers in Afghanistan are fighting to establish peace in that region, and in so doing, keep the conflict from reaching its population.  This is a matter of policy which the German leaders have adopted.  Why then should the common German take it out on the soldier who is simply fighting for his country and its people?