c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ I was walking through a city park and thinking, of all things, about Sen. John McCain’s comment concerning Yugoslavia:”We have got to win this war.” He had emphasized”this,”as if to say, Let us do this time what we failed to do before. Let this war be different.

Different from what? Different from Vietnam, where the Arizona senator was a prisoner of war? From the Persian Gulf War, where an American-led alliance saved oil fields but stopped short of ousting Iraq’s Saddam Hussein?

As I mused, I came upon an outdoor theater where a community brass band was warming up and a small crowd waited patiently.

I walked on. But then I heard the band launch into”The Star Spangled Banner.”I turned and faced their direction. I stood at attention and felt warm respect.

What a change from 30 years ago! I thought. As the Vietnam war tore apart my generation, turned sons against fathers, and sent classmates home in body bags, the National Anthem became one more token of division. Like the American flag, which some burned in protest and others waved in anger, the anthem lost its capacity to stir respect.

Is that what Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., hopes the firestorm raining on Yugoslavia will undo? Will the Yugoslav campaign heal a national psyche that was badly bruised by a pointless and unsuccessful war in Southeast Asia?

Not exactly. I didn’t feel pride today because American leaders finally figured out how to wage a war without incurring American casualties. Or because this president seems determined to dethrone the bully.

Something deeper is going on here, I think. It has to do with the specter of genocide. We read about Serbian troops storming into Kosovar villages, going from house to house in search of ethnic Albanians, raping women, slaughtering young men, forcing children to watch their parents die, and dumping bodies into mass graves.

We see photos of refugees being herded into wretched camps. We hear them wail for missing kin.

I think we see more than another eruption of Balkan insanity. We see the Jewish Holocaust. Whether we were alive when reports of Nazi atrocities seeped out of Germany or know the Holocaust through Anne Frank,”Schindler’s List,”Elie Weisel and Washington’s Holocaust Museum, images of the Holocaust burn deeply in modern souls.

Nazi Germany’s systematic extermination of European Jews stands, in Western eyes at least, as the defining moment of this century, not only because it showed consummate evil, but because we watched it happen. We didn’t have CNN and NPR documenting the slaughter, but we knew. Our European allies knew exactly what Hitler was doing. Even here, across the ocean, we saw Jews fleeing Europe. We turned away boatloads of them.

That, I think, is the”this”to which bombing in Yugoslavia speaks. Not that saving Kosovars from Serbs will atone for the slaughter of 6 million Jews, but that this time, the Western world won’t stand by while one European people seeks to exterminate another.

That, I think, is why I stood at attention as an off-key band played the National Anthem. Nations are defined at least partly by the wars they choose to fight. Our military adventures after World War II gave little cause for pride. We seemed cynical and paranoid, concerned more for oil and bananas than American values, willing to prop up any corrupt regime that claimed to be anti-communist.

The America I grew up respecting stood for something larger _ freedom, the infinite value of human life. I know our internal record is mixed. But it was idealism that shaped my generation, and it was idealism that Vietnam crushed, not because we had poor military strategy, but because we squandered lives in a prideful chasing of imaginary demons.

If the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia were about nothing more than finally fighting a war the right way, I don’t think we could stomach it for long. Look how hastily we left Kuwait once the oil fields were secure.

But in Yugoslavia, the”land of the free”is defending an oppressed people’s right to live. While any bomb is lamentable, that defense of freedom merits respect.

DEA END EHRICH