Yesterday I spent about twenty minutes talking with a soldier who is home for a couple of weeks before returning to Baghdad. Initially I had no idea he was a soldier - we were all at a kid's birthday party and were surrounded by little boys in Power Ranger suits and Batman costumes all wielding plastic swords and light sabers.
Now, allow me to take a half-step back and put kid birthday parties into perspective. I can't go to them anymore without feeling a sense of loss. Last year, the six-year-old daughter of one of my closest friends was killed when a car struck her. I have countless birthday party photos and videotapes at home of my own kids' birthdays... and like a ghost, my friend's daughter often appears in frame laughing and smiling. I see birthday parties and photographs now in a different light. It's not a black cloud that turns every event into morbidity - it's just makes them all slightly colored. I go to parties and look around and wonder if any of these kids won't be here next year. Like my buddy's daughter.
So... back to last night's party. I start talking to J - a young man with a pretty wife and an infant son in his arms. That's when I learn that he's Army. He's been to Iraq twice in the last 18 months. And goes back in a couple weeks. In the hour or so that he was at the party, he never put the boy down. While he's in Baghdad, he'll miss the boy's first birthday. And he'll miss seeing him crawl. And he'll miss his first steps. J doesn't come back until the end of the year.
J is making a huge sacrifice.
And for what?
That's what we talked about. His answer - he doesn't know.
His job in Iraq is to train the Iraqi security forces. The ones that Rumsfeld keeps telling us about. Rumsfeld tells us how ready they are - all 230,000 of them. The ones that are supposedly ready to defend their country once we leave. And we all wonder, well... where are they? Well this soldier wonders the same thing. Recently J and his fellow soldiers were training a group of Iraqis. They spent weeks with them. Then, one day, the Iraqis were gone. J doesn't know why the left, only that they did. His best guess is that the Iraqis didn't like the US commander. So they just left. J figures the Iraqis will sign up again. Somewhere else. In the hope of getting a different commander. Now I see how Rumsfeld gets those numbers. How many of these Iraqis are signing up again. And again. And again. I asked J - "So, what did you guys do after the Iraqis left?" He tells me "Nothing. There was nothing to do. Our mission was to train them... and they left."
And at the birthday party, Red Power Ranger and Spiderman clashed with sword and saber. And J kept holding his little boy who watched the big kids in wide-eyed awe (not realizing he was in the arms of the real hero). And I tried not to think about the fact that J might never return from Baghdad, and that someday he would be like my friend's daughter - a ghost that lives on in some birthday party videotape.