War of People

 

It’s a mark of the communications revolution that while significantly fewer people are dying in the IraqAttaq than did in previous wars, but the impact is significantly greater. The media now make the killings somehow more personal in a maudlin sort of way, humanizing statistics into a poignant sense of loss.

And that loss is not just personal. So often the descriptions of those whose lives bled out in the desert sands define bright, courageous individuals. What a waste for our country. Teachers, linemen, cops-‘n-fire...people from our every day lives are gone, leaving families to grieve and memories to remind us that the war on the television wasn’t shot on a Hollywood back lot.

In Vietnam, there were some really bad weeks for American soldiers, most of them young men, most of them from the lower end of the economic spectrum. More than five hundred were killed in a single week, all too many weeks. By contrast, since we invaded Iraq, the toll is approaching a total of 11-hundred.

One was a 20-year-old Idaho man who was killed in an explosion in a Baghdad slum. His father had been a Ranger in Vietnam. Caught up in the patriotic fervor post Nine-Eleven, the young man enlisted the defend his country, to please his father.

He left a final message to his father on a disk that was labeled, "My Time has Come," to be opened only in the event of his death. He said, "I learned a lot from my dad and I wanted to be like him. I wanted to do something that would truly make him proud of me."

In fact, his father had been furious at his son and his recruiter for the enlistment. After the funeral, he said "I shouldn't be burying him, he should be burying me. The war is not worth it now. We need to get the hell out of there."

Yessir, and if we’d learned anything from Vietnam, we wouldn’t ever have gone to Iraq in the first place.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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