The day I found out my college graduate brother from our non-military family signed up with the Marines, my perspective started to change. The Iraq war had begun. Things were bad. I knew that for every bit of fear I held about it, my mother held more fear as only a mother could.
The next few years would be difficult, as we all grasped to visualize what he was seeing, hearing, doing. Communication was often extremely scattered, short and uninforming. When the reports came in on radio and television, it was a struggle to stay positive and keep from wondering if he was there when "it" happened--whatever that "it" was.
And you hear it almost every day still. You know the voices on NPR and ABC. And you can predict the arrangement of words in the announcements. "Today in Anbar Province, three more troops were killed in combat."
What happens when you hear that? Do you physically or mentally change the channel? True, it's hard to internalize after years of this. And anyway, what can you do about it? But I ask you not to blur it out. We don't see their faces. But we know they're men and women--many of them very young--with the best of intentions. And they're gone. In a strange place with giant camel spiders, heat that you would not believe and loved ones connected to them with faded pictures in their pockets, they're gone.
Years later, after my brother has served twice in Iraq and is now working elsewhere under the Department of Homeland Security, I realize that I can't blur the armed services and any associated combat into an amorphous mass of "why?" It's no longer easy to pass off as something with which I can't identify or understand.
Despite your politics, the bottom line is that for every veteran that returns, he or she has experienced things you can't imagine. Many of them are positive, like rebuilding schools or sewer systems. But most likely, there are also people he left behind with uncertain dates of return, people who he knew who died in an irretrievable instant, and people he knew who will return with one less limb or with an unseen but severe emotional wound that impacts daily life in perpetuity.
My request is simple: just carve out a few moments in your heart today and everyday to remember those who have come home to us and those who haven't.
2 comments:
They are always in my heart.
During the first days of Operation Desert Shield in 1990, CNN interviewed a 19 yr-old paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne Division. I said aloud, Oh my. He's younger than me. That's when all the numbers of troops became real people to me. I can't remember his name but I still remember his baby face and sweet smile.
I thank my father, my husband, my neighbor, the VFW Vets selling poppies, I thank them all for doing a job I know that I couldn't do.
Thank you for a beautiful post, Gropy. I still can't imagine being in a war, any war. And if I were ever faced with the prospect of sending someone I love to fight in a far off country where the reasons for dying and killing are muddy and suspect, I know in my heart I couldn't do it. It's like saying you love the person but hate their behavior; I don't hate the soldiers but I can't understand how they do what they do, either. I feel badly for feeling what is sure to be characterized as unpatriotic, but so be it. I don't romanticize or praise our soldiers. I only feel horribly sorry for them and fear for them. War is crazy and except for rare exceptions such as World War II, I just cannot justify or explain its evils away. Old men send young men and women to die for reasons that cannot be explained.
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