As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq...I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle.
In the November Vanity Fair magazine, rah-rah war cheerleader Christopher Hitchens writes a moving tribute to a dead soldier, Mark Daily, killed by an I.E.D. in January in Iraq, called "A Death in the Family."
Apparently, what moved Hitchens to write this loving tribute was his discovery that Daily--a registered Democrat who hailed from a California family who opposed the war--had been moved to join the army and go to Iraq after he read numerous Hitchens-penned pro-war diatribes, full of glowing and romantic and glamorous phrases like LIBERTY and JUSTICE and FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY.
This fact became incontrovertable when Hitchens visited the dead soldier's MySpace page and found links to his own articles under a blogpost entitled "Why I Joined."
So shaken is Hitchens, apparently, by this news that he tracks down the devastated family--two loving parents, siblings, and a young bride...for what? To apologize? To find grace and forgiveness? To be reassured that this young man had a mind of his own and that pro-war rants did not lead him to his death and splatter his blood all over the chickenhawk who glamorized it?
You know what COURSENS AND SICKENS me about all this?
These pasty-faced middle-aged white men who were the loudest and noisiest pro-war advocates HAD NEVER THEMSELVES EVER ACTUALLY SERVED IN ONE.
What makes me SICK is that they are now discovering--to their mutual shock and horror--that THIS IS WAR.
It is not f***ing John Wayne. It is not f***ing Clint Eastwood.
There IS nothing glamorous or righteous or romantic about war.
They are genuinely surprised to learn that war is horrible and sickening and disgusting. Sweet young men and women like Mark Daily go over there and get the skin burnt off their bodies and their brains splattered all over the pavement and their hands shot off. They are forced to kill or be killed. They are forced to watch dear friends die in horrible ways.
Innocent people die, too. Poverty-striken people trail along the sides of the road with everything they can carry on their backs; their homes get bombed; their children get blown up.
Somehow these chickenhawk movie-fans who hollered the longest and loudest for our army and Marines to go "liberate" a nation actually believed that it really would be simply a matter of smart bombs taking out a few bad guys and then our boys and girls wading through the flowers and sweets to secure the oil fields for all prosperity.
YEARS LATER they STILL advocate this war, because, like Hitchens, not only have they never fought in one themselves, but neither have their own children.
THEN, something happens. Something personal. Suddenly, a boy dies who maybe wouldn't have if it hadn't been for the chickenhawk bloviating of a dipshit who thought war was about waving flags and marching to victory and triumph.
Hitchens describes in moving detail the memorial services for this young man and even, incredibly, the very private moments when his family scattered their boy's ashes on the beach. Hitchens read Shakespeare aloud to them when it was his turn to speak, but mostly, he cried.
Shakespeare, by the way, did not secure a spot in the literary heavens by writing love sonnets or fantasies or comedies--he became strewn through the stratosphere by his TRAGEDIES, and every single war play he wrote was a tragedy.
Every single soldier or Marines who dies in this miserable endless war IS A TRAGEDY. Christopher Hitchens might have only just now started to feel the staggering pain of a death of a soldier, but I would like to point out to him that there are three thousand and eight hundred-plus others just like it.
IT IS WAR THAT IS COURSENING AND SICKENING, and anyone who ever had to fight in one will do everything in his or her power to prevent any more brave soldiers and Marines from having to fight in another one, as Colin Powell and Gen. Shinseki tried so futilely to do.
The whole damn country got caught up in war fever, aided and abetted by rantings like Hitchens's, as well as bold graphics and dramatic music and powerful voiceovers glamorizing and romanticizing this epic struggle every night on the evening news.
A few months later, the commander-in-chief put on a warrior-costume and marched across a movie set to pronounce this glorious conquest ACCOMPLISHED.
He never fought in a real war either. Neither did his secretary of state or any of the war's other architchects. Hell, half the generals who did the Pentagon-planning never really fought in war either, because this country had been at peace, for the most part, for an entire generation. All they could remember was the sterile, painless Gulf War and what a great boost that was to the media morale, eh?
So quick were they to send other people's children off to fight their glory-war, and to this day, five years later, four thousand more dead, thousands more injured, hundreds of thousands shell-shocked and no end in sight, they are STILL selling their war.
But those of us who have sent loved ones into the breech over and over again and who know the true cost of war find all this lofty talk about "liberation" and "freedom" to be so much bullshit. This is not a fuzzy-lensed TV commercial. This is combat.
Ultimately, that's what Hitchen's piece was about. It was about the idealism of a young man who drank the idealistic Kool-Aid and paid the ultimate price. His grieving family gave Hitchens the grace and forgiveness he did not deserve, and they are honored as much as their lost boy.
Mark Daily was an outstanding young man of courage and valor. He rode off willingly to fight in a war he believed was about glory and honor and victory.
But in the end, it was about a fifteen-hundred pound bomb buried under the pavement that ended his life and three others in one heartbreaking split-second.
THAT is war. THAT is truth. It's the color of blood, and I hope Christopher Hitchens and all the other chickenhawk cheerleaders drown in it.
