War

My friend, Bill O' Daly, whose poetry and translations of poetry grace our lives, has forwarded this extraordinary excerpt and link to an article by Weston Kosova that appears in the latest issue of Newsweek.  I agree with Bill that this essay stands out from the usual twaddle one so often finds in the American press about this war.

For myself I can only say that I flew home yesterday from a brief speaking engagement at the University of Michigan and I talked to a ticket agent at Northwest Airlines in Detroit who had just processed a group of National Guard soldiers who were on their way to Iraq.  She said that all of them were only a year or two older than her own boy who is 17.  She said they were still so young that it broke her heart to see them lined up and moving through the security checkpoint.  She said that one young man turned to her as he was about to step through the metal detector and said, "Once we go through security, there's no coming back."

My friend, the agent from Northwest had to hide herself and weep.

S.K. 

Excerpt:

“More than 3,000 U.S. service members have now died in the Iraq war. At first it was difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the number of deaths. After four years, it is now difficult not to feel numb. In a nation without a draft, the emotional connection between the front and the home front is the weakest it has been in a major conflict in recent memory. There are so many news accounts of troops killed in combat that the details blur. The death of one soldier, or 20, loses its power to shock, except to the families of the fallen.

At some point, the way we talk about the war itself changes. We speak less and less about husbandless wives and parent-less children, and instead obscure the suffering in vaguer, more distant and—guiltily—easier terms. We shake our heads and talk about the ‘losses.’”

--Weston Kosova

Black Hawk Down: The True Cost of Iraq War
By Weston Kosova
Newsweek

Comments

[Georgia Whitney]

When I travel and see these young soldiers in the airports I have pretty much the same reaction as your ticket agent friend, and I'm not even processing them. Most of them don't look old enough to be shaving.

Georgia

[Wren]

Thanks for pointing me to a fine article. I've posted the link to it, and to your blog, on mine.

[Connie]

Thanks for the link Wren. I've linked to you as well. See "Nightmare on Pennsylvania Ave."