I’m reading a sad and poignant book – Thank you for Your Service – by Pulitzer Prize winner David Finkel.
The book follows soldiers and their families as they attempt to reestablish
their lives after serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s about PTSD and panic
attacks and suicide and trips to VA hospitals for treatment or counseling, and
wives who live in fear of the damage their husbands might do. Some soldiers returned
home to fanfare, with flags and streamers and bunting and posters, others
stepped back onto American soil alone.
Unlike other American wars, the territorial objectives in
Iraq and Afghanistan were not defined, and identifying the enemy wasn’t easy.
As David Finkel notes, “the thing that got to everyone, was not having a
defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no
enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief, and it helped drive some
of them crazy.”
I lost count of the number of references to “warriors,” a
term I despise as much as the overused “heroes,” though this is no fault of
Finkel’s -- it’s the common parlance of the post 9/11 era. Yes, some of the men
and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan performed heroic acts, but to call
all service people “heroes” is to demean the word. The truth is that referring
to returning soldiers as heroes and warriors makes for more palatable PR on the
home front. It’s not like the Pentagon can admit to the families of the fallen
that their son or husband died for a mistake. Soldiers are told repeatedly that
the nation is grateful for their service, that because of their sacrifice the
rest of us are free to pursue the American Dream. Even as vets sit in
dilapidated and overcrowded VA hospitals waiting for treatment, or sleep in
doorways on the streets of Los Angeles or Topeka, or struggle to convince an employer
that they are sane and stable, even when it’s clear that the nation lost
interest in Iraq and Afghanistan years ago, the refrain of gratitude plays on,
an endless loop. The official feel-good narrative omits the fact that the
invasion and occupation of Iraq was completely unnecessary, a war of choice
based on lies told by politicians and bureaucrats with heads full of imperial ambition,
abetted by a news media guilty of astonishing gullibility.
USA! USA! USA!
The approved narrative doesn’t confront our futility in
Afghanistan either; thirteen years later and we still cannot bend that battered
country to our will. Thirteen years! Longer than the Civil War and World II
combined.
Have our leaders learned that wars are relatively easy to
start but difficult to end, and that their costs continue long after government
bean counters have closed the books? Unlikely. Our political leaders would
rather cower behind platitudes than confront the consequences of their hubris. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice will be held harmless by history -- once it has
been whitewashed and sanitized -- a process well under way. In all the rhetoric
about the War on Terror, we rarely consider the costs inflicted on the other
side, the Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed or maimed by American bombs and
bullets. Instead we fabricate tales about the righteousness and purity of our
motives, how our only objective was to protect Americans from fanatical terrorists
while delivering American-style democracy and freedom to the oppressed people
of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Such fantasies carry a hefty price tag.
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