Last week’s New Yorker carried a wonderful piece of journalism called The Casualty, by Dan Baum.
After reading it, George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Douglas J. Feith, Richard N. Perle, I. Lewis Libby, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and other warhogs too numerous to list would all be obliged, if they lived in a shame society, to commit ritual suicide.
One heartbreaking passage among dozens in Baum’s story:
Whatever their retirement prospects, all the amputees said they had no regrets. Robert Acosta spoke of the need to fight terrorism and the choice a soldier makes to face death. “Shit happens,” he said. Steve Reighard said, “I believed in what we were doing.” If we hadn’t gone to war, he said, “eventually we’d see chemical arms and those kind of munitions on our streets.” The other soldiers nodded. At one point, Reighard leaned over and said quietly, “You know, we kind of have to think that.” He gestured at his missing arm. “Otherwise, this is in vain.”
Posted by Jerome Doolittle at March 18, 2004 02:26 PM | TrackBack
This gets back to what the young Fightin' John Kerry said: how do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?
Posted by: sinful on March 18, 2004 03:41 PMOne feels for their earnest desire to justify the injury done them by the corrupt, demented, political cabal of Bush, Cheney, and company.
They are mistaken. The way for the loss not to have been in vain is to do as Kerry did, stand up and decry the insanity that enabled the destruction: to try their damndest to see that noone else suffers needlessly.
Of course, they would be pilloried by the cowards of the Bush Admin as whiners, but their courage has limits they have not yet tested, and, in the end, except for the most deranged of the rightocracy, the validity of their stance would be understood or so one would hope.
It is too much to ask of these young people, I know. That there are many ways to deal with the emotions this reality engenders is something honest counselors would be allowing them to see.
Posted by: Arthur on March 19, 2004 06:08 PM