AmerCon : Mil : Casualties

Military / Casualties

In the imagination of America, the right wing is more aligned with sacrifice and death than the

liberal progressive left wing. Perhaps we are aware, unconsciously, that the gifts we have as a

wealthy nation should be "paid for." In blood. And perhaps these unconscious motivations are

part of the reason we are forgiving of Republican Presidents who, without exception since

Nixon, have misused the military in illegal wars and lied to Congress and the American people

about doing so.

If we were honest we would claim that such use of the military is un-Constitutional, unpatriotic,

un-American. Even un-Christian, un-Islamic, un-Jewish. If we were honest, we would be

disillusioned with Republicans, because they are warmongers

If we were honest

, we would

acknowledge they are without conscience in their devotion to the wars they desire,

and

worse,

they are

torturers

of their imagined enemies

-- with

astonishing disregard for

American

and

international law.

And what we will not look at is that the sacrifice and death that draws us is designed by state

policy to be someone else's death and some other family's loss. We do not share equally in

this sacrifice. We ask our media to ignore the bodies of our poor children warriors and our

black children warriors piling up around us -- as if this is what they are for. To die for our

freedom and our comfort.

If this isn't what we intend

if this isn't what our children are for, why do we vote for this?

And

will we not look at the death we have chosen for them?

Selected Reading

2005.08.12 A war of disabilities: Iraq's hidden costs are coming home

U.S. Labor Against The War / Glasser, Ronald J., Harper's Magazine

2005.01.31 Walking Wounded

American Conservative / Fred Reed

The American Conservative
2005.01.31

Walking Wounded
Old soldiers don't fade away

by Fred Reed

The observant will have noticed that we hear little from the troops in Iraq and see
almost nothing of the wounded. Why, one might wonder, does not CNN put an enlisted
Marine before a camera and, for 15 minutes without editing, let him say what he thinks? Is
he not an adult and a citizen? Is he not engaged in important events on our behalf?

Sound political reasons exist. Soldiers are a risk PR-wise, the wounded a liability. No one
can tell what they might say, and conspicuous dismemberment is bad for recruiting. An
enlisted man in front of a camera is dangerous. He could wreck the governmental spin
apparatus in five minutes. It is better to keep soldiers discreetly out of sight.

So we do not see much of the casualties, ours or theirs. Yet they are there, somewhere,
with missing legs, blind, becoming accustomed to groping at things in their new darkness,
learning to use the wheelchairs that will be theirs for 50 years. Some face worse fates than
others. Quadraplegics will be warehoused in VA hospitals where nurses will turn them at
intervals, like hamburgers, to prevent bedsores. Friends and relatives will soon forget
them. Suicide will be a frequent thought. The less damaged will get around.

For a brief moment perhaps the casualties will believe, then try desperately to keep
believing, that they did something brave and worthy and terribly important for that
abstraction, country. Some will expect thanks. But there will be no thanks, or few, and
those quickly forgotten. It will be worse. People will ask how they lost the leg. In Iraq, they
will say, hoping for sympathy, or respect, or understanding. The response, often unvoiced
but unmistakable, will be, "What did you do that for?" The wounded will realize that they are
not only crippled, but freaks.

The years will go by. Iraq will fade into the mist. Wars always do. A generation will rise for
whom it will be just history. The dismembered veterans will find first that almost nobody
appreciates what they did, then that few even remember it. If-when, many would say-the
United States is driven out of Iraq, the soldiers will look back and realize that the whole
affair was a fraud. Wars are just wars. They seem important at the time. At any rate, we are
told that they are important.

Yet the wounds will remain. Arms do not grow back. For the paralyzed there will never be
girlfriends, dancing, rolling in the grass with children. The blind will adapt as best they can.
Those with merely a missing leg will count themselves lucky. They will hobble about,
managing to lead semi-normal lives, and people will say, "How well he handles it." An
admirable freak. For others it will be less good. A colostomy bag is a sorry companion on a
wedding night.

These men will come to hate. It will not be the Iraqis they hate. This we do not talk about.

It is hard to admit that one has been used. Some of the crippled will forever insist that the
war was needed, that they were protecting their sisters from an Islamic invasion, or
Vietnamese, or Chinese. Others will keep quiet and drink too much. Still others will read,
grow older and wiser-and bitter. They will remember that their vice president, a man named
Cheney, said that during his war, the one in Asia, he "had other priorities." The veterans
will remember this when everyone else has long since forgotten Cheney.

I once watched the first meeting between a young Marine from the South, blind, much of
his face shot away, and his high-school sweetheart, who had come from Tennessee to
Bethesda Naval Hospital to see him.

Hatred comes easily. There are wounds and there are wounds. A friend of mine spent two
tours in Asia in that war now little remembered. He killed many people, not all of them
soldiers. It is what happens in wars. The memory haunts him. Jack is a hard man from a
tough neighborhood, quick with his fists, intelligent but uneducated -- not a liberal flower
vain over his sensitivity. He lives in Mexican bars few would enter and has no politics
beyond an anger toward government. He was not a joyous killer. He remembers what he
did, knows now that he was had. It gnaws at him. One is wise to stay away from him when
he is drinking.

People say that this war isn't like Vietnam. They are correct. Washington fights its
war in Iraq with no better understanding of Iraq than it had of Vietnam, but with
much better understanding of the United States. The Pentagon learned from Asia.
This time around it has controlled the press well. Here is the great lesson of Southeast
Asia: the press is dangerous, not because it is inaccurate, which it often is, but because it
often isn't. So we don't much see the caskets -for reasons of privacy, you understand.

The war in Iraq is fought by volunteers, which means people that no one in power cares
about. No one in the mysteriously named "elite" gives a damn about some kid from a town
in Tennessee that has one gas station and a beer hall with a stuffed buck's head. Such a
kid is a redneck at best, pretty much from another planet, and certainly not someone you
would let your daughter date. If conscription came back, and college students with rich
parents learned to live in fear of The Envelope, riots would blossom as before. Now Yale
can rest easy. Thank God for throwaway people.

The nearly perfect separation between the military and the rest of the country, or
at least the influential in the country, is wonderful for the war effort. It prevents
concern. How many people with a college degree even know a soldier? Yes, some, and I
will get e-mail from them, but they are a minority. How many Americans have been on a
military base? Or, to be truly absurd, how many men in combat arms went to, say,
Harvard? Ah, but they have other priorities.

In 15 years in Washington, I knew many, many reporters and intellectuals and educated
people. Almost none had worn boots. So it is. Those who count do not have to go, and do
not know anyone who has gone, and don't interest themselves. There is a price for this,
though not one Washington cares about. Across America, in places where you might not
expect it-in Legion halls and VFW posts, among those who carry membership cards from
the Disabled American Veterans-there are men who hate. They don't hate America. They
hate those who sent them. Talk to the wounded from Iraq in five years.
_____

Fred Reed's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Harper's,
and National Review, among other places.

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