Crossposted at Attytood:
The most frightening sound in America doesn’t make any noise.
It is a deafening silence, roaring like a Plains tornado across places like the Gopher State of Minnesota, where the families of about 2,600 National Guard soldiers found out their stay in Iraq had been extended by another four agonizing months. And it echoes and ricochets all over, in the smog-blanketed barrio of East L.A. and under the rust brown shadows of smokestacks in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley, every poor or forgotten neighborhood where the bulk of America’s fighting men and women grew up.
It is the sound of a doorbell that hasn't rung yet.
A terrifying void that lingers like a shroud over so many households, too many to count, even more than the 160,000 troops who are over there now, doing their best to finish a job that makes even less sense now than it did when it started nearly four years ago. There was a poll last week that said that 17 percent of Americans knew someone who was killed or wounded in Iraq.
But how many more than that are out there now, listening to the doorbell that hasn't rung, a nothingness that wakes you up at 3 in the morning with a sudden jerk, flapping butterflies that never leave your gut, no matter how loud you turn up the TV and try to drown it out.
I’ve been thinking about doorbells a lot since last week, and some stories that I stumbled across. In my Internet travels, I saw a photo of a soldier dad and his toddler son, who opened the door when the men in uniforms finally came, and then I read this article:
Lori Bowe had a standing rule for the past year and a half that no one was allowed to ring the doorbell at her home on Juniper Drive in Moon Township.
The rule had become so ingrained in the neighborhood, even the mail carrier and the Schwan's delivery man knew not to push the little white circle next to the door.
As long as she never heard the two-toned ring, she knew that her son, Pfc. Matthew Bowe, was alive.
"She would yell at you if you rang that doorbell, because her worst fear was that the Army would ring the doorbell to tell her Matt had died," said Branden Ryan, Bowe's best friend.
In the end, her rule didn’t make a lot of difference. It turned out that when the Army representatives came to Lori Bowe’s door last week, she wasn’t home. It was instead a phone call from her husband telling her that her son Matthew, a combat medic who went to Iraq to save other lives and ended up sacrificing his own, had died when the jeep he was riding in drove over a landmine in Baghdad.
A doorbell isn’t supposed to be an object of terror. It’s supposed to be mostly a herald of good tidings, when you son’s best friend shows up with a sled, or when the pizza arrives 45 seconds before the kickoff. In my own home, the doorbell – inherited from an earlier owner – is downright goofy, playing songs like "Turkey in the Straw" and even "Hava Nagila."
Probably the guy who invented my ridiculous type of doorbell never pictured a military Humvee parked in someone's driveway, an Army chaplain pushing the button to play "Oh Susanna." Doorbells just weren’t meant to be like that.
And yet, too often, they are like that, in Oakland and Columbus, Ohio, and in Anaheim and in Knox, Pa., and in Falls City, Tex.
Look, it’s a total oxymoron, but for some reason war came hand-in-hand with civilization, and -- although we are right to oppose and hate it with every ounce of our soul -- war and bloodshed and soldiering will be around long after we’re gone. And so we fight for all kinds of reasons, including self-defense, and sometimes to fight naked aggression by someone else, or a against campaign of genocide. But not every fight is necessary, nor are so many silently ticking doorbells.
That ticking was already pretty loud when someone inside the Beltway first got the idea to invade a country that didn’t attack us on 9/11, and it grew decibel by decibel, with every day that weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq, with every layer of lie that peeled away like dead skin on our body politic. And now, in a senseless Catch-22 of a war where we wake up deciding whether to fight the Shiites of Eastasia or the Sunnis of Eurasia, the dormant doorbell must sound like a freight train.
I wish there was a giant doorbell in Washington, with big fat speakers up on Capitol Hill and down near the White House and in every corridor of power. And that it was somehow wired to the real ones in Moon Township and everywhere else, and that it could go off every time a chaplain informed a loved one that soldier was killed – that would be about three times a day, on average – and that it could wake up our leaders in the middle of the night or make them jump up from their comfortable table at the Palm.
And then I wish they would make it stop.