The next time someone compares football to war, think of Joe Brown.

Think of the former Ohio State defensive lineman and Army Ranger and — on this Memorial Day weekend — the meaning of loss and sacrifice.

Not long ago, a well-intentioned friend asserted to Brown that football — with its brain-rattling hits and militarized culture — was surely just like real battle, if not even tougher.

Which, well, where did he begin?

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With the games he played in controlled conditions with a clean jersey, clear head, and full stomach? Or with his two tours in Iraq? Say, the second one in Baghdad in 2007 where he slept a couple of hours a night on dirt floors and lived on beef jerky, rice, and water. Where he relieved himself in a barrel and didn’t shower for two months. Where every step he took outside the firebase, the enemy waited to destroy him. Where during an airstrike he tumbled 30 feet down a stairway shaft and smashed his head, causing severe brain bleeding.

“Those are the conditions of war,” Brown said.

And it is hell.

“[Before] my military experience, I never thought much of the football and war analogies,” said Brown, who lettered at OSU from 1997-2000 and is now the parks and recreation director in Copperas Cove, Texas. “But there is no comparison at all. This actually makes me a bit sad, reflecting on a few buddies who had really bad days overseas and are no longer with us.”

I bring this up because, for the longest time, I’ve rolled my eyes at the war metaphors we use in football. The coaches and players who wouldn’t know a foxhole from a hole in the ground. The warred-up hype videos.

Nowhere is the military-football complex cranked up more than at Ohio State, where LL Cool J’s “It’s Time For War” blasts on loop in the Buckeyes’ facility the week of the Michigan game, and its official pump-up videos often traffic in combat themes. In one of them, before last year’s season opener, the toll of war is conflated with losing a football game.

Against the backdrop of dejected Ohio State players and Clemson celebrating its national title, the narrator — a retired Navy SEAL — intones: “War is a nightmare. But war is also an incredible teacher. War teaches you about sorrow and loss and pain.”

Fans loved it. I thought it was completely nuts.

I mean, WHAT!?

But enough about me. 

At this time of remembrance, I was curious for the thoughts of the former Ohio State players who know first-hand the nightmare of war — and not the The Ten-Year one. I wondered what they think when they see these videos and Buckeyes players wearing dog tags or carrying clickers, as they did before their playoff win against Alabama in 2014, the devices a replica of those used by Allied troops during nighttime landings on the beaches of Normandy to distinguish friend from enemy.

I wondered about veterans like Brown, whose grandfather died as a POW in Korea and was inspired by 9/11 to enlist. And Mike Lanese, the receiver who made the play of the game in the Buckeyes’ 21-6 win against Michigan in 1984 and later became a Rhodes Scholar and an officer in the Iraq War. And Greg Lashutka, an Ohio State co-captain who as a Navy lieutenant was responsible for detecting underwater bombs in Vietnam.

What do they think?

Gently, they shake their heads.

“Those descriptions are obviously inaccurate, and I can see how some of my military friends and family could take offense,” Lanese said of war-speak in football. “But I don’t really get worked up about it because I know it’s a sign of good times.”

It’s a good point, and like the others, he knows Ohio State coach Urban Meyer means well. The former players appreciate the time-honored urge to compare football to battle, the ideals inherent on a far more consequential scale in the military — teamwork, selflessness, discipline — applying to fall Saturdays too. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, during his time as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, wrote: “Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that upon other fields, on other days will bear the fruits of victory.”

“I've asked many friends who are lifers in the military, and I think they would know from Woody Hayes all the way through Jim Tressel to our staff, we are never equating what we do to what they do,” Meyer once told me. “We have the utmost respect and honor for what they do. When you have a chance to learn from the very best, it's just an opportunity to learn.”

Still, there is a line between tribute and trivialization — between honoring our truest heroes and anesthetizing the horrors of war — and many continue to cross it.

Including, at times, Ohio State.

Lashutka, the former Columbus mayor, calls the war-themed videos “over the top.” Same with Brown, who smiles every time he hears a player or coach mindlessly spout military jargon. “You wish you had a moment to sit them down and talk,” he said.

As well as anyone, Brown knows a game is not war. Nor is war a game. He has been through hell and back, and it was not against Michigan.

Others were not as fortunate.

Contact David Briggs at dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.

First Published May 25, 2018, 5:56 a.m.