He's about twenty and walking his girlfriend's dog at 6:00 a.m. where she lives in a 425 square foot apartment in a marginal neighborhood in Houston. Wearing his combat gear and so I am wondering how he feels.
Turns out that he's in the guard but may have to go back to Iraq again within the next year. He's seen my Obama sticker on the car, and maybe I need to tread carefully.
But when I say that I am not a fan of the "Commander in Chief" he starts nodding. Then when I say, what the hell is "Victory" over there and he replies that it's the cradle of civilization and why the hell do we have to rebuild it when our highways are crumbling.
I tell him about how I drove on I-80 in Eastern Iowa just a month ago in heavy rain and how you could not see the lines on the roads. He nods and says, why are we paying for their shit while they have all this oil money?
Then he starts saying that he will vote for McCain because we'll be in Iraq for a long time and at least McCain is saying so.
I urged him to resist. I looked into this handsome young man's eyes in the same way I did to my colleagues in October 1971 when I had a low draft number and Nixon was doing the same kind of thing we are doing now, and kids all around me were asking for advice on how to get out of going to Vietnam.
"This is your life", I said. "Some of those kids I tried to coach all those years ago are dead." (I had letters from physicians about my recent bout with tuberculosis, so I was even exemmpt from CO service, though I had qualified as a "conscientious objector".) I was at a loss about how to get disqualified back then short of kissing the guy next to you.
So I really feel bad for this kid and I like the dog too. He does not understand what the hell this mission is about, mainly I would guess because nobody could define what a "victory" in Vietnam would have been.
So maybe I got through to him. I definitely support the troops who think this way.
As in "what would constitute "victory" in Iraq? This was seemingly the most important issue to this kid.
So why aren't we hearing about that? The implicit goal is a puppet regime in Baghdad. When has that ever worked?