The look is one of lust: vicarious lust, they want to know what its like. These are the folks who most often say, "I would have joined the Army, but the dog ate my AFSVAB test," or "I almost enlisted in the Navy Seals, but I broke my big toe," and they just freaking piss me off.
It's the same impulse that drives some of the violent movies and games, I think, and I'll be the first to admit that I too, like my share of violent entertainment. Why? Are we the Romans? Will the next step in reality TV be a two thousand year step backwards? The ultimate in reality TV will be an American infantry platoon in combat, and guess what folks, its not that far out a concept. It wouldn't be out of character. I finally realized that the reason few Americans were concerned about the impact of sanctions in Iraq (much less the impact of bombs) is because to them, it just wasn't real. Except for the eldest among us, few Americans have any conception of what real suffering means. To us, real suffering is having to wait three hours while our SUV gets fixed up, or suffering a thirty minute power outage. September 11 was a terrible anomaly, a shock and a tragedy to be sure, but familiar to the rest of the world. It was such a shock to us precisely because we largely lead sheltered, privileged lives.
To the Iraqis, suffering was watching your kid slowly starve. Or never knowing what happened to a missing loved one. Having a father killed in the war with Iran, or in Kuwait, or in one of two wars with America.
Here's what I knew about the Iraqis in 1991:
They had the fourth largest army in the world, a fierce, battle hardened force.
They threw babies out of incubators and speared them on their bayonets.
They tortured their prisoners.
They were in my f*cking way if I was ever going home.
I knew all of that then, but now I don't know any of it. Turned out the baby incubator story was an out-and-out lie, invented by a Washington public relations firm and supplemented by the testimony of the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and a Congress which took no steps at all to determine if they were being lied to. To you it may be academic that they lied about it, but to me it determined the shape of my life, because I killed for that lie. Some might think the lies that launched us into war are irrelevant, but those people never pulled the trigger, or looked at a stack of dismembered human bodies, or machine gunned a burning man who ran away.
They told us the Iraqis lied to their own troops. The Iraqis have been told that Americans will torture them, or shoot them. What about the lies they told us?
You would think, after more than fifteen years, and three-or-four more wars, a new life with a family and a job and whatever, I wouldn't still be so goddamn angry about it.
If you thought that, you would be wrong. I thought that, but then, a couple years ago, I watched on television as the Third Infantry Division crossed the border into Iraq for the second time, and I felt a strange pulsing above my left eyebrow as my blood pressure climbed, and I knew that another generation of soldiers and civilians was about to go through hell. Some of them I know, because they were there the last time, too.
This time it is worse, far worse. Even though it took lies to get Congress to vote for the last war, at least there was some provocation. After all, Iraq did invade Kuwait. But what about this time? Prior to the war I believed they were lying, and now we know for a fact that they were. To the pundits or people watching television, it is academic. It might be scandalous that the President lied, but no one, except on the hardcore left, is calling for his impeachment or resignation. For my neighbors and for many of us in this country, it is, once again, an academic question.
To the soldiers and civilians whose lives have been laid waste, it is anything but. The irony, of course, is once we got there, there’s no going back. You can’t take down a national government and all its institutions and replace them with nothing. That just leaves you with a failed state, an incubator for terrorists, and humanitarian disasters. It leaves you with future enemies.
Which takes me back to the question I'm still avoiding -- just what exactly did it feel like to pull that trigger and watch a man die.
The thing is, I'd never been a terribly confident person. I turned twenty during the war, and I think in some ways I was a lot younger. Sergeant Lino, my platoon sergeant, wasn't just my tank commander and platoon sergeant, in some ways he was almost a father figure, and I continually felt uneasy, as if nothing I ever did was quite up to snuff. What I remember most about it: more than anything else, I wanted to do the right thing, I wanted to do what would make Sergeant Lino proud of me. That's why I killed, I think: because I didn't have what it took to feel good about myself, I needed someone else's approval. I needed Sergeant Lino to think of me as a man, and not as the scared little kid I really was.
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