This week, a flight of eight military jets—handsome and sleek, with bright-red tails—flew over the shuttered Las Vegas strip, so close to the city the roar could be heard from the ground, their dark bellies close to the glassy spires of empty hotels. Flying in tight formation from Nellis Air Force Base, they issued plumes of cloud into the desert air, uniform trails that dissipated into the big, bright, cumulus-dappled sky over the empty streets. It was a thank you from the United States military, said the U.S. Air Force Demonstration Squadron, “to show appreciation and support for the healthcare workers, first responders and other essential personnel in Las Vegas and around the nation who are working on the front lines to combat the coronavirus." Each Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon plane costs $18 million; it costs roughly $8,000 to fly a single one for an hour. There they were, the shiny hardware of the United States’ endless wars, soaring cleanly over a newer and bitterer struggle, and away.

It was a military salute—flush with all the cash the Department of Defense has lavished on its deadly, elaborate toys—to those conscripted against their wills into peril. “Doctors and nurses are at the front lines of this war and are true American HEROES!” wrote the president on March 18, echoing the martial metaphor. The danger is real, the pressures to work are as inevitable as the harshest draft. In America’s military conflicts around the world, beneath the pomp of heavy-duty equipment, the ordinary soldiers fighting America’s wars have faced similar privation: they have entered conflict zones without proper body armor or bulletproof vests, returned traumatized from deployments to find inadequate care and scant employment prospects. The same government that disgorges endless elaborate fighter planes, scattering billions to defense contractors without a thought, leaves the working stiffs at its front lines undefended. The rhetoric of heroism—with its encouragement of sacrifice for the fatherland—obscures the fact that so much of this suffering is unnecessary. And the same is true of those battling the plague at home, the new “war on the Invisible Enemy,” as Donald Trump puts it.

Far below the F-16 airspace, on the streets of American cities and towns, millions have lost their jobs with no hope of recompense or any reliable transfer from governmental coffers to alleviate their hunger. Those of us who can are doing our best to stay indoors to counteract the rise of a virus whose viability on surfaces and in the air remains contested. The possibility of air poisoned with unknown disease hearkens back to older eras of plague. During the Black Death of the Middle Ages, Medieval medical science, such as it was, rested in large part on theories of the air. The very name for malaria, an ancient and still deadly disease, evinces the long and influential life of miasma theory; the name is a contraction of the Italian words mala aria—“bad air.” For premodern scholars and doctors, the emissions from marshes and rotting organic matter—miasmata—putrefied the air, mingled with the breath and gave rise to epidemics: cholera, influenza, plague. Today, there are innumerable unanswered questions, as the deliberate pace of science is overrun by piling bodies tumbling into mass graves. We know enough to know that the danger comes from other people: from breath, from cough. For those lucky enough to be able to sequester ourselves, the very air itself feels like a threat, a miasma bearing plague into our lungs.

But millions more are venturing out daily into this miasma. There are those working to keep the floods of patients alive: doctors, nurses, hospital aides, respiratory therapists, physician assistants, hospital sanitation workers, and administrative workers. There are those who work to get us fed and medicated: grocery workers, farm laborers, pharmacists, restaurant workers, warehouse packers, delivery workers. There are countless more, on dairy farms and chicken plants; there are prisoners sewing face masks for their own guards. Each thin polyester gown and polypropylene mask is a few dollars, a miniscule fraction of the cost of a warplane flown in honor of a doctor or a grocery worker. Yet none of them are sufficiently protected. It is not even close.