“All men’s lives have value.” Never a truer statement has been made. What’s interesting is that, historically, men have no value, despite being told how much privilege we are supposed to have. One privilege nobody talks about is the one to be sent to slaughter. I am, of course, talking about war. I cannot help but combine the scene from Saving Private Ryan with the reality of what those men went through, the dead everywhere, floating in rivers of blood and being cut down mercilessly by an unending wall of projectiles. The men at The Bulge, holding the line despite frostbite and random barrage of artillery and gunfire from the opposing line. A man being paraded around over the heads of Somali soldiers like a side of beef after his Black Hawk helicopter is shot down. A man I knew had the privilege of walking with his unit in Vietnam disarming Vietcong booby traps in front of his soldiers while the enemy shot at him.
A year ago I had the privilege of being a driver for the Invictus games, and during those three days I only met one woman who had been injured in combat. She is an amputee, her leg, and playing sports for the Americans. With her was a man in a wheelchair, missing both legs, and another missing an arm. I transported many, but only one woman. I honestly don’t think she was the only woman at the games, but of all the men, she was the only woman I personally transported.
My point is that men have privilege, the biggest has been, throughout history, of being slaughtered, cannon fodder, for war. While there have been women who have died as a result of war, we celebrate those, while conceding the men to the mass graves of time. Men are remembered individually only by those he was closest to, but when a woman dies or is injured, we as a society remember her collectively. We write books and tell stories of them. We may do that for men, so called great ones like Patton and Rommel, but we tell stories of the unit, not the individual, when it comes to history.
I have always contended that equality will occur when the number of men who die on the battlefield equals the number of women; when the number of men who are maimed equals the number of women. That contention is usually taken to mean that we need a million women to die before we achieve equality. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that, for every man who dies on the battlefield, one woman should too. That is equality. Until that happens, the women’s lives will always be more valuable than men
