Armies are instruments acting out the will of politicians. So I have always understood, but Plains Indians back in the day had a different understanding. You could tell a leader not by his regalia, but by whether anybody was following. Warriors who lost belief in either the leader or the cause could simply go home, and on occasion they did.

While the traditional Indian view has moral superiority to recommend it, the instrumental view of an army is what wins wars. The moral weight of the decision to go to war falls on politicians, not on the soldiers.

The war my generation fought, Vietnam, was so odious, and the rationale for it such a steaming bucket of offal, that those of us who were taken in got tagged with the stupidity to an unfair degree.

Indians, as usual, get it even worse. The bad rap on us is that we choose to serve in the colonial military in the first place, and that, in the eyes of some, is corruption of our values before we finish boot camp, without regard to what foreign land we might be sent on some fool’s errand.