Yesterday while flying home from Colorado, I shared my peanuts and struck up small talk with a young man sitting beside me. He was headed back East to visit family, was a fellow southerner who loved Colorado, he couldn't wait to get some real "sweet tea", and this past Friday had been his last day in the army after serving for 5 years in Special Forces.
Usually I try to avoid conversations with people on planes, preferring to bury my face in a book, but I was curious about meeting someone from the military community after spending this summer in a progressive Colorado mountain town with Obama signs everywhere; I had heard the Colorado Springs area was very conservative with its military presence, different from the rest of the state. By the time we landed in Atlanta, what had started as polite chat with a stranger turned into a deeply moving exchange that both surprised and saddened me, but gave me hope.
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars
for young men to die in.
George McGovern
The young soldier and I traded stories of his paratrooper training at Fort Benning with ones I had heard from my airborne-trained husband; I told him how my husband was drafted a few weeks after dropping out of college in 1968, he told me how shocked his parents were when he signed up for the Army right after high school in 2003, joining up partly in response to 9/11. I told him how the Army wanted my husband to be an officer, but he would give them two years only, spending 12 months in heavy combat in the rubber plantations near the Cambodian border as a lead scout in a reconnaissance unit. He told me that he been to Iraq with Special Forces, had been trained as a communication specialist and was supposed to be deployed again, but had decided to get out of the Army. He seemed torn about it and hoped he had made the right decision. We talked of my husband coming home with 2 Purple Hearts, but never talking about his Vietnam experience with anyone but two or three fellow veteran friends once he returned, and most people, even close friends, hadn't known he was a veteran.
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Sir Winston Churchill
I was reluctant to bring politics into the conversation, because it was going along so sweetly, but I blurted out to him that the one thing my husband had thought was learned from Vietnam, the one lesson that could be taken from that awful war where so much had been lost, was the absolute confidence that it would never happen again. My husband was so angry, sad and disbelieving that our country started this war in Iraq, and once again had gotten involved in an unwinnable situation, young lives were being sacrificed because some politicians decided to use them as pawns in their power game, not remembering, or choosing to forget recent history. I added that we were really hoping that Obama was going to win, because McCain seemed bent and determined to carry out a personal grudge, and he was never going to get us out of Iraq.
I held my breath and watched his face as he told me that he and most of his friends were sick of the war, tired of it...it was not progressing, it was not working. He described to me the situation as he had experienced it in Iraq; trying to get the Iraqi people to change from survival mode to thinking in terms of the long term future was just not happening. Training an Iraqi for a career as a policeman was to give him the finest weapons, the best equipment, better sometimes than what the our soldiers had, give him career development strategies, education, only to have him quit and disappear after a week or so, sell his weapons to the nearest buyer, because the idea of delayed gratification did not exist for him, he could not count on there being a future.
War is delightful to those who have not experienced it.
Erasmus
I asked about the surge and he dismissed it; he said there were periods of less fighting, of quiet, but then the violence would start up again, somewhere else, and would continue to...He saw no way of "winning", how would that possibly ever be defined? There was no combat zone, but random attacks, roadside bombings, and there seemed to be no end to it.
I mentioned that I thought it disgusting that the administration was sanitizing the war, not letting on about the extent and number of debilitating injuries and amputees, not showing photographs of the carnage. He told me then about several of his friends who had been deployed on the mission he had missed due to his decision to leave the army.
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
~José Narosky
There had been an incident with a roadside bomb, and one of his best friends from his unit had been blown up so badly that his remains fit inside a container the size of a shoe box. Two other good friends had been injured and were now in a hospital recovering enough so that the doctors could amputate what needed to be; one was losing a leg and a foot, the other, a passionate runner, his leg. He had visited his friends in this hospital that specialized in burn victims and amputees, and you could see the impact of this visit in his haunted eyes.
As the plane landed, I thanked him for sharing his story, and wished him all the good luck I could give. My heart felt so full at that moment, so full of sadness for this young soldier, for his lost ideals, for his fallen friends, so full of happiness thinking of his parents and the relief they would feel as they welcomed him home, so full of despair for our country for starting another war that is unwinnable and sacrificing the lives of beautiful young men and women, so full of hope that maybe, just maybe we will elect someone who will make wise decisions, will lead us out of this war, the hope that even those in the military, maybe especially those in the military, will reject the Republicans and
support the election of Obama, because they, more than anyone, are so tired of this war.
John McCain, of all people, knowing the horrors of war firsthand, should have had the judgement to not rush into this war, but instead led the charge, and continues to insist that he will stay till there is victory. That is all the information I needed to make the decision to vote for Barack Obama.
I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.
Barack Obama
UPDATE: Thanks so much for all the kind comments. I am truly humbled. I have a son about the same age as this young soldier, and when I said goodbye to him, he told me his name and it was the same as my son. Poignant moment for me...