I've been talking about the Iraq war since the first trial balloons went up (remember "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August?"). It seems like it's always been bouncing between background and foreground. While American soldiers have been fighting in Iraq, I graduated from college, landed my first "real" job, applied to law schools, picked one and finished more than half of it. While people my age performed the sysephian task of trying to pacify a country that doesn't want to be pacified, I went from college newspaper dork with no job prospects to a $160,000 bigshot.
But how much have I really matured? JG lived a few doors down from me during my freshman year in college. During orientation, we were friends by default, meeting up to explore campus and eat in the cafeteria. A few days into orientation, he came back to the dorm one afternoon and told me that he had joined ROTC. I was taken aback by the casualness with which he made the decision to wake up at 5 a.m. every Tuesday and accept a post-college job before even sitting down for one class. The day he signed up, we walked to a remote corner of campus where the ROTC building stood and for about an hour, I watched JG wait in line and then climb the climbing wall on the side of the building.
After that, I didn't spend much time with JG. He joined the campus ROTC secret society (a process that involved a lot of screaming at odd hours and getting blue paint all over the communal bathroom) and I only saw him when he dressed up to present the flag before lacrosse games. I'd find him in the crowd and we would make small-talk about the game and people from our old dorm.
JG went to officer training after graduation while I moved to D.C. and temped for a while before I got a full-time job. We promptly forgot each other for three years until one afternoon, I got bored enough to scroll through Facebook's list of everyone from my graduating class. I added JG, he accepted. I didn't message him and he didn't message me. I saw that he married and was deployed to a forward operating base somewhere in Iraq. For obvious reasons, he didn't update very often, so he stayed off my news feed and I once again forgot about JG.
Yesterday, I got an email from someone I had never met asking me for photos and memories of "J" for his funeral. I knew many people with that name first name, so I thought it was either a joke or a mistake. Then I looked up the stranger on Facebook and I saw that we had only one friend in common. It was JG. He was killed by a roadside bomb last month at age 26.
I've always moved among segments of society that don't normally sign up for military service. I knew a NGO worker and a few journalists who had been there, but no fighting men or women. "Support the Troops" always struck me as hollow, since the phrase is nearly always associated with a pre-existing viewpoint on the war.
Now that I know someone who died in the war, has my opinion of the war itself changed? Not at all. While I lived it up on student loans and house parties, JG made hard decisions, got married and faced death every day. He had to make thousands of little decisions, any one of which could kill him if he got it wrong. I've slipped up more times than I care to admit, but the worst I face is a bad grade or a "let's just be friends."
So what does my "support" mean to him, or anyone else in his position? Who am I to infantilize someone who was more mature than I may ever become? He answered when his chain of command called and dutifully did as he was told, which is all we should expect from a person who has voluntarily signed up for military service. He did his country proud, but the civilian leadership let him down by making bad strategic decisions starting at the beginning of this whole misadventure. As a voter, I come in at the level of civilian decision making by participating in the political process. Justifying your beliefs based on what's best for "the troops" is an attempt to justify policy positions based on reflected glory and honor. It's not support by any means. No number of troops can save this mission, just as no number of magnetic car stickers or flags is going to make a person like J.G. more capable, brave or noble. As if he needed it.
R.I.P., J.G., 1980-2007.
If the Bush cronies had spent as much time and effort in planning and executing this "WAR ON TERROR" as they have in branding, selling, focus-group testing their slogans and assorted propaganda things might have been different, but I doubt it. I don't think they were ever concerned with winning anything so unwinnable as this debacle. They achieved their purpose, to completely f*ck up national debate and focus with their game of 3 card monty while they deflect attention from real problems while they have the van out back of the bank slinking away with all the money for them and their robber-baron brethren.
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