Our Forgotten War

Wars are not easy to explain, let alone understand. They rarely have been throughout history, and they are even less so today. Periodic spasms of violence — the brush fire wars beyond our shores that increasingly crowd our screens — have become more indecipherable than the conflicts our fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers faced. Most people simply graze their newsfeeds; war becomes stripped of context and reduced to 280 characters, a caustic meme, or a reductive slogan. We chew it into some kind of easily digestible notion — reacting with routine outrage, more often than not — and spit it back out.

Compared with Americans, Canadians have an even harder time understanding why people shed one another’s blood. Our cousins to the south have long presented themselves and their wars with such grandiosity that, for us, a gag reflex takes over. Writing in the Globe and Mail in a 2007 op‑ed, the historian Jack Granatstein labelled this reflex our...