I was twenty-eight in 1969, the date that is used by some to be the start of the end of the Vietnam War. I don’t know what year to give for the start of the end of the Iraq War. I thought it was 2004. I was wrong. Listening to Petraeus today, it seems that the start of the end will not be 2007.
From those years in the sixties and seventies, I have collected many songs that speak of the waste of war, the tragedies that always accompany it.
Yet it is not Baez or Dylan that I hear in my head when I think of what is happening in Iraq. Two or three years ago, in my early days as a contributor on Daily Kos, someone introduced me to the music of John Prine. I am now embarrassed that I did not know of his work before. I have since heard him in concert live in Manchester in the UK. He is, like Baez and Dylan, a poet. Perhaps, even more a poet for the common man than any of them.
It is not specifically a protest song about war to which I refer. It is a song, "Hello In There", about the loneliness and feelings about growing old. There are two lines in it, however, which constantly haunt me:
"We lost Davy in the Korean war,
And I still don't know what for, don't matter anymore."
It is through unexpectedly, in the middle of the song, hitting that simple statement about the loss of a son, the sense of the futility of it and the sad dismissal of it as a dim memory that no longer has relevance to anyone, that gives the lines their power.
Most of you reading this piece will not have been alive during the Korean War. I was very young myself. For someone living in a country that was just recovering from the enormity of confronting Hitler on its doorsteps, it seemed like something a long way away. It had little questioning. Our men were dying, the enemy was cruel, we were told that the defence of the freedom of the world made it just. I knew little about it then. I know not much more now, because I have never revisited the history of it. I guess it don’t matter anymore.
Why John Prine’s words affect me strongly, however, is because of what I hear today from many who still support the Iraq debacle. "If we pull out now", they say "Our young people will have died in vain".
Your nation experienced 58,000 Americans dying in Vietnam and within a relatively few years now sees the regime against which it so bitterly fought as a major trading opportunity. I don’t know why it does not question and has been able to accept for so long this further waltz into killing in Iraq. It seems that the lessons of Vietnam and the deaths of all those young sons and daughters "don’t matter anymore".
Yet what concerns me most about this plea that we do not turn the death of so many our people in Iraq into something that is meaningless is that it is based not on any justification of the war but simply on the deaths that have gone before. It says to us "Never mind how originally wrongly based was the war. Never mind how we were taken into it. We must continue to have more of our people die so that we can achieve a victory to justify those who have gone before, whether their deaths were for a just cause or not".
It is a macabre plea but one that seems to resonate with so many of our people. It is used dishonourably in Congress as form of political blackmail, threatening what will be said to the electorate if the Democrats bring the debacle to a swift end before the vague objectives in Iraq are achieved.
The service families who have lost their sons and daughters, wives and husbands in the conflict use it with sincerity. It is used unthinkingly, but it is difficult to think through pain.
Like the subject of John Prine’s song, I fear too many of these families will sit on their porch in their old age, or simply stare through the back door screen as he describes, desperately trying to recall the smile of a child they lost in this conflict and say "And I still don't know what for, don't matter anymore".
I didn’t hear this concern in the words of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker today. I didn’t hear much in what they said. Because they did not speak what we, the common people, understand – let alone say it in the words of a poet.