On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the first World War ended. Germany was plunged into a poverty from reparations paid to Europe that would motivate a monster two decades later to begin the process all over again. In 1918, the Bolshevik revolution was in full swing, and most of the major atrocities of the twentieth century (easily the bloodiest in human history) were yet to be committed.

In the United States, the holiday is known as Veterans Day. On this anniversary, we remember those Americans who have died fighting for our causes, those with roots in good, and those with roots in greed. Popular and unpopular, vague and immediately recognizable, these conflicts color over a half a century of bloodshed at the hands of Americans and almost every nation and people on earth.

Today our president carried a wreath to honor those who died unjustly and unnecessarily, along with those who committed acts of heroism and humaneness.

With a solemn face, he completed the ceremony, as his staff formulated estimates for the number of those whose lives will likely be lost in his coming war. Perhaps he feigned respect for the dead he came to honor, perhaps he believed that his action was honest. As I watched the ceremony, however, I was struck by one thought: he was doing nothing to stay the deaths of thousands more... in his gallant pursuit of regime change (and oil), he will throw hundreds of thousands more of us into the line of that violent fate; even as the CIA says pursuit of this war is more dangerous than inaction; even as the former inspector general of the UN vehemently defends that the work of his inspectors disarmed the nation 95%; and even as no one contests the fact that even the most dire estimates do not place Saddam's nuclear arsenal anywhere near acquiring the power necessary to assault the United States directly.

Even as the United States (the only nation that has ever actually used the force of a nuclear weapon aggressively) continues to develop its own nuclear arsenal and would certainly not consider full disarmament within even this decade reasonable...

When will Veterans' Day be a time for Armistice again? When will we realize that we should not have to continue to add thousands of names to the rosters of those whose lives were cut short by war? How many will this new war claim? How much more grief will this generation have piled upon it?

When I was thirteen years old, I hitched a ride with a man who had fought in the Gulf war. Before he dropped me off, he produced from his glove box photos at first no different than those anyone in the military has in scores... people in uniform, smiling faces on foreign coasts, all the great war machines that are the pride of our forces; but, in the back of the pile were three or four of charred bodies, half buried in sand.

They were just like road kill, he said, we had to keep the tanks on the desert trails that had been swept for mines... so we had to roll over these people like meat, more and more of them the longer I stayed.

I recall the scene in 1984, the protagonist brushes a severed human hand into the gutter, like a discarded bottle or toy.

Every day of this war, fill your mind not with pictures of shiny war machines and clean, precise bombs. Fill it instead with all of the images of true, tragic carnage that the war will truly represent. Every time that tally of dead comes in, picture each agonized face, each soul buried in the silence and separation of eternity. Then tally the true costs of a "modern conflict."