My late father, a tail-gunner on a B-17 during the Second World War, often said he considered it a good lesson in life having been able to observe at a young age the shameless invocation of the phrase “precision bombing” while he knew firsthand that the reality was otherwise. The boys on his airbase in England often talked about such things. They understood the destruction and death they were delivering to civilians was not unintentional, no matter how the target was described in military terms, such as when they were sent out over western France — 800 miles west of the April 1945 battlefront — to bomb some large holdout German gun placements, fully aware that the French civilians were unprotected while the surrounded Germans would be ensconced in concrete bunkers.

Like many, he did not like talking about the war, a reticence difficult to comprehend in a later age given to self-branding as a virtue. But it is easy to imagine his words in our disjointed world as it offers up a tiresomely predictable sequence: American missiles and jets deliver daily rounds of destruction and civilian death to targets in a growing list of countries. Official explanations consist mainly of high-toned obfuscation, the words “surgical strike” repeated with a liturgical intonation. The punditry gushes about decisiveness. Verses of approval are sung by a choir of legislators who have no interest in oversight of either the objectives or the broader effectiveness of such ventures.

Most of the nameless millions who came of age during the Second World War are now gone. The complicated and often darkly ambivalent wartime reality they lived through has become strangely unfamiliar and distant, reshaped and well-manicured over the years by war historians into an object of veneration. No favors have been done for a docile society strangely unmoved by an inexorable descent into perpetual military conflict conducted in the American name on the soil of multiple nations. There can be no question about the link between the final passing of so many who were so marked by what they saw and did in the Second World War, and the more recent outbreak of tinny voices peddling a giddy fear throughout Western societies, doing so as a method for political advancement and pecuniary gain.

My father and all the others knew well the war’s ungovernable dark reach. They understood what such a war leached into society. Most of all, they never forgot how they had lost the prime of their youth facing down what had been wrought by leaders in a faraway land who, like those today closer to home, had a triumphant casualness about taking up military battle, especially against those perceived to be lesser beings.

It is an old and unexceptional story. History leaves little doubt as to the fate of conjured myths of supremacy and the deliberately warped discernment of threats presented by the otherness of certain groups of people. There are no terms of immunity available, whatever the type of governance represented in such actions.

Matt Rohde (rohde.eternities@gmail.com) is a writer and former federal government trade official living in Carroll County. His most recent book is “When Eternities Met — A True Story of Terror, Mutiny, Loss, and Love in a Disremembered Second World War.”