My son telephoned us late in the day yesterday to wish us Merry Christmas and to say he was back on base in Fallujah. The call had been preceded by a brief email from him that said, "The line for the phone is about 90 minutes, but I’ll call (eventually)."
Needless to say, after being unable to avoid the continuing grim news out of Iraq — three U.S. soldiers killed on Saturday, three more this morning — I’m comforted to know that my son is OK — for now — but as anxious as ever over his continued safety as well as the "additional sacrifices," as George W. Bush calls the inevitable future casualties, yet to come. This is quite aside from the despair and anguish I feel for the soldiers’ families who received the ultimate tragic news this Christmas weekend.
As The Guardian reported via AP this morning, the military deaths in Iraq have now exceeded the 9/11 death toll:
"In a span of a few hours, 2,973 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In a span of 45 months, the number of American troops killed in Iraq exceeded that grim toll as the war continues.
The milestone in Iraq came on Christmas, nearly four years after the war began, according to a count by The Associated Press. In announcing the Monday deaths of three soldiers, the toll from those fighting the war surpassed the toll from those killed by terrorists in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania."
The article goes on to describe the deaths of three young kids who, like my son, enlisted in response to the 9/11 attacks:
Jonathan Lootens, from upstate New York, joined the Army. "This is something I have to do," he told family members. The 25-year-old sargeant was killed during his second tour of duty when a roadside bomb went off near his vehicle in the city of Kirkuk.
Marine Lance Cpl. John Edward Hale was only 15 and living in Louisiana when the planes hit the World Trade Center, but he never forgot what happened. He joined the Marines after graduating high school last year, and was only in Iraq for three months when he was killed by a roadside bomb.
Michael Glover joined the Marines after his boyhood neighborhood - the Belle Harbor section of Queens, N.Y. - lost several residents in the Sept. 11 attacks. . . Glover was killed by a sniper while on patrol in Fallujah.
Any of these could be my son. What’s more, I know I’m deluding myself into thinking that if he can just get through this tour of duty — if he can survive the next three months — all will be put right: my sanity will return, I’ll sleep again through the night, my family will remember that I can converse about topics besides Iraq, and I can take a break from blogging.
But the tragic upshot is that kids are being killed on their second or third tour, after they’ve already risked their lives for Bush’s reckless war. And if Bush, who is deluded, gets his way, if Congress capitulates to his bunker-mentality demands, and Iraq is flooded with a "surge" of "fresh" U.S. troops, it means kids on their fourth or fifth tour, decades before they deserve to, will have one more crack at meeting Charon.
And if this situation isn't surreal or galling enough, The New York Times reports that Bush is now protecting himself against "the unbearable burden a commander in chief would have to face if he came to the painful realization that he wrongly sent troops into combat."
My question: how do military families protect themselves against a president who continues to inflict the unbearable burden of loss by sending their loved ones into a catastrophically planned, unnecessary -- unwinnable -- war of choice?