One thousand.

It’s an impressive number, but not too large that it overwhelms us.  It’s not a million, or one hundred thousand, or even ten thousand. those numbers are too large allow us to see the individual trees for the forest.  Or the individual people in the crowd.  One thousand people would fit comfortably in a single section of a single deck in a modern sports stadium. Or comfortably fill the floor seats in an arena at a political convention.

From a distance we can see the crowd, but if we want to, if we chose to, we can we can focus in and see each individual.  If we can see an individual, we can imagine who he or she is. Maybe the soldier comes from a poor rural area in West Virginia or a desperate ghetto in New York City or Los Angeles  and volunteered for service as a way to pay for an education.  Or maybe they come from a family and a patriotic community in upstate New York where military service is a common value and tradition.  For each, it’s a unique set of circumstances and desires that inspires him or her to volunteer. These include a desire for personal achievement, a desire to provide a better life for their families, a desire to serve and protect their communities and their nation.

For each of the one thousand, we can imagine a broken family.  Maybe there is a younger sister who adored older brother who once made her angry by teasing her when she was a little girl and once again with his smothering overprotection when she became a teenager.  We can imagine her crying all night long on the day her brother shipped out.

Imagine the soldier had a mother who, for all of his life, had only one identity, one role that mattered: mother.  She raised him right.  She picked him up when he fell, she cradled him when he cried, she disciplined him when he needed it.  She had an abiding faith in the goodness of God and she did all she could to instill this faith in her son, so that for all his life his conscience would  guide him and protect him.  When he went off to war, she prayed to God every morning and every night for his safe return.  And when he was killed by an I.E.D on his way back to base camp after a surviving hazardous patrol, she wondered why God had abandoned her.  Maybe in time she can put the broken shards of her faith back together and make peace with the universe, but the certainty of that happening is by no means assured. Who are we to judge if she cannot?

His father has no outlet for his grief.  It is his duty to comfort his grieving wife and sobbing daughter, but their pain (like his own) is beyond his reach.

All those who knew him are left with an impenetrable void that will be with them for the rest of their lives. While this void will never be filled, his memory is always with them.  They remember him forever as he was: young, optimistic, looking to the future with the aura of invincibility only the young and innocent can possess.  He never ages. An ethereal spirit, he becomes an idealized and why shouldn’t that happen?  What in his young life could he possibly had done to deserve his senseless fate?  He is silent and passes no judgment, but in moments of moral ambiguity the people he left behind think of him and wonder what he would think about the choices they make.  He becomes their conscience.

May the politicians and generals who presume to lead, and to all of us who grant them our permission to lead, devote at least some small part of our conscience to the forever young.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

© 2010, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

That’s how it was for children then.  If the soundtrack of my childhood was provided by the Beatles, the quiet rumbling counterpoint was Vietnam.  I was far too young to truly understand or to be directly affected by the war, but there was no doubt that it mattered to the adults and near-adults around me.  It mattered to the neighbor’s son who got drafted and the other neighbor’s son who volunteered.  It mattered to the older brothers of my and my sister’s playmates who were old enough to be facing the draft.  It mattered to the Methodist church youth group and boy scout troop whose young leaders considered their options, some choosing to serve, some choosing Canada.  They were boys I looked up to, who carried the flag in the Queens Anniversary Day parade, who organized volleyball games at church picnics, who taught me how to hold a baseball bat, and who taught me how to tie a square knot.

Although I was too young to get drafted and both my older siblings were girls, there wasn’t one circle of relationships in my young life – family, school, neighborhood, church – that was left untouched by the war.  And not one adult in my life was left unaffected.  In the stoic silence of a friend’s father when a name was mentioned, in the joy in that same father’s voice when talking about his son’s imminent transfer stateside, in the funereal mood in another family’s living room presided over by a framed eight by ten on the mantelpiece, in my parents’ dinner table conversations about this or that person’s son, the war affected me in ways I am only coming to understand now.

These wars that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are not ours the way Vietnam was.    The men and woman who fight, and  their families, are but a small segment of our society.  They come from the rural regions, and from inner cities where military service offered a way out.  They come from families with patriotic traditions of service.  As of now, there are 140,000 troops in Iraq and over 32,000 in Afghanistan.  At the end of 1968, in contrast, there were of half a million troops in Vietnam.  During the Vietnam era, the draft raised over 2 million men for service.  As unfair as the process was, with deferments less easy to obtain by the poor and minorities, it still reached deeper into our society.  Today, most of us remain untouched by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These wars of today are given perfunctory coverage in the evening news, if they are covered at all.  The stories of the soldiers, their anguish and their terror suffered in our names, while we keep up with Angelina and Brad and Jennifer, are never heard.  The scars, physical and emotional, are invisible to most of us.

Ryan Smithson is a soldier in the Army Reserves from upstate New York who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005.  Upon returning home, he began writing personal essays, recounting his time in Iraq and what it was like returning home.  Several of his essays have been published on the web and next month, his book, Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI, will be published by Harper-Collins.

Ryan’s essay “A Little Taste of Death” appeared in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of the Oregon Literary Review, his essay “Silence and Silhouettes” appeared in Shattercolors Literary Review, and his essay “Hard Canvas” appeared in Identity Theory.

See larger image Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI (Hardcover) By (author) Ryan Smithson List Price: $16.99 USD New From: $5.99 In Stock Used from: $1.50 In Stock Release date April 21, 2009.

© 2009 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

This week, Salon.com is publishing a series of articles about the problems combat veterans are facing coming home.  Untreated PTSD and callous treatment by the military are driving suicide and homicide numbers to the highest levels in decades.  In the first article, we read about Adam Lieberman, whose problems were ignored by the army until he attempted suicide.  Before that, he was a drunk, a fuck-up, anything other than a soldier traumatized by harrowing and gruesome combat experiences.  Just reading about them sends jolts through my nervous system:

"A guy’s face was blown off from his nose to his chin," he said as we sat at his dining room table with Heidi while he was home on leave recently. The U.S. soldier was gagging, drowning in blood without a mouth or nose. A medic performed an emergency tracheotomy. The soldier died anyway.

During another engagement a gunner atop Adam’s Humvee suddenly collapsed in Adam’s lap. Only a thin flap of skin attached the gunner’s head and torso. Beheaded. Adam vomited.

He once saw the lower half of a friend’s body sheared off by a roadside bomb. In the seconds that followed before he died, his friend still moved his right arm and tried to talk. He looked at Adam. Adam described the look in his eyes as "terror."

Even after the attempted suicide, instead of proper treatment, the army charged him with defacing government property for writing his suicide note on a wall.  Then they got his mother to help them whitewash it.

The introduction to the series: "Death in the USA: The Army’s fatal neglect"

The first article: "The Death Dealers took my life!"

© 2009, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.