7,000 people died last week in the Russia Ukraine war. When I was in Desert Shield/Storm made a sign that said 'Stop The Maddness'. The Senior Officers said TAKE IT DOWN.
MY BAD ...
The Sign They Ordered Down: When Conscience Clashes with Command
The number hits like shrapnel: 7,000 lives extinguished in a single week within the grinding horror of the Russia-Ukraine war. Each digit represents a universe lost – families shattered, futures erased, communities hollowed. It’s a statistic so vast it threatens to numb, a grim testament to the relentless, industrial-scale brutality of modern conflict. Reading this, a veteran’s memory surfaces, raw and resonant: a hand-painted sign during Desert Shield/Storm, bearing the desperate plea, "Stop The Maddness," swiftly ordered down by senior officers. "MY BAD..." echoes now, not as apology, but as a bitter, decades-laden recognition of a silenced warning that reverberates with terrifying relevance today.
Your experience in the desert captures a profound, often unspoken tension within the military machine: the collision between individual conscience and the demands of command, the institutional imperative for unwavering unity, especially on the precipice of war. That sign, scrawled with deliberate misspelling or perhaps raw urgency ("Maddness" feeling viscerally correct in its chaos), wasn't just cardboard and paint. It was a human response to the gathering storm, a flicker of moral unease amidst the sand and steel. It spoke the quiet part loud – the inherent, terrifying absurdity and destruction that is war.
The order to "TAKE IT DOWN" was predictable, perhaps even understandable within the rigid hierarchy preparing for combat. Dissent, however small, however heartfelt, is seen as a crack in the facade of absolute readiness. Morale, perceived as fragile, must be protected, even if it means shielding eyes from the grim reality of what "readiness" truly entails. Questions, doubts, expressions of horror – these are luxuries command structures often believe they cannot afford. The machine must roll forward, and individual flickers of conscience risk gumming the gears.
But "MY BAD..." now? That’s the weight of hindsight bearing down across thirty years. It’s the crushing realization that the "madness" you instinctively named in the Kuwaiti desert wasn't an isolated episode, but a recurring, metastatic disease of the human condition. It wasn't stopped. It merely shape-shifted, relocated, and erupted again with even more devastating ferocity on European soil. The silencing of your small sign feels symbolic of a larger, persistent failure: the inability of systems – military, political, diplomatic – to truly hear and heed the warnings born of witnessing war's true face.
Seeing 7,000 dead in Ukraine isn't just another news cycle for you. It’s a grotesque echo. It validates that gut feeling you had holding that sign. The "madness" wasn't hyperbole; it was diagnosis. The relentless artillery duels, the decimated cities like Bakhmut and Mariupol, the mass graves, the streams of refugees – this is the madness unleashed, operating at a scale and intensity that dwarfs even the fears of 1991. The senior officers who silenced your protest likely believed they were preserving focus for the necessary task at hand. Yet, looking at Ukraine, one must ask: what if the real necessary task is the constant, unwavering challenge to the very logic of such destruction? What if silencing the dissenters, however small their platform, inadvertently protects the madness itself?
Your "MY BAD..." resonates because it speaks to a universal veteran’s burden – the knowledge carried by those who have seen the elephant. It’s the knowledge that war is not glory, but gore; not strategy games, but children buried under rubble; not decisive victory, but generations poisoned by trauma and hatred. It’s the knowledge that the "madness" is always lurking, requiring constant vigilance and courage to confront, even – especially – from within the ranks tasked with waging it.
The 7,000 dead this week are a screaming indictment. They demand more than thoughts and prayers; they demand a reckoning with the mechanisms that allow such slaughter to persist. Your desert story, small and personal as it was, illuminates one critical point of failure: the suppression of the moral voice that names the horror for what it is. When the instinct to cry "Stop!" is met with orders to stand down and fall in line, the path is cleared for the madness to march on, evolving, adapting, and finding new fields upon which to reap its ghastly harvest.
Perhaps "MY BAD..." isn't just personal regret. Perhaps it’s a challenge flung across the decades to all of us. Will we continue to silence the voices, however humble, that dare to name the madness? Or will we finally find the collective courage to truly listen, to heed the warnings born of experience and horror, and demand, with unwavering insistence, that the killing must stop? The 7,000 souls lost last week, and the countless thousands before them, deserve nothing less than our refusal to look away, our refusal to be silenced, and our absolute rejection of the madness that consumes them. The sign needed to stay up. It still does.
#Ukraine #Russia #War #DesertStorm