Steve Russell: Indians know war sometimes is the lesser evil

Wars are always fought for reasons that must be mysterious to the kids fighting them. At my age, I’m entitled to say “kids,” but I was 17 when I joined and my son was 18. Our knowledge of foreign affairs was, to put it kindly, limited.

Buffy St. Marie’s song, "Universal Soldier," tells it how it is. The individual soldier “really is to blame” in the sense that if he does not offer up his body, then the politicians would throw a war nobody attended.

Still, Hitler hated American Indians no less than Jews. In Mein Kampf, he cited extermination by English colonists with approval and decried the intermarriage practiced by Spanish colonists. While all war is evil, sometimes it’s the lesser evil.

All American Indians are descended from warrior cultures. All those cultures I know have some tradition of honoring warriors.