Three pieces caught my eye today with a common theme: the personal consequences of Bush’s elective war in Iraq.
First, there was a piece in today’s NYT about an ex-reservist who’s been activated for duty in Iraq.
[M]y cousin Alan – the youngest – joined the Ohio National Guard after graduating from high school in 1997. […] My primary concern was whether Alan was in good enough shape to get through the arduous training. Once that was over, he had to train with his unit for only one weekend a month and two weeks a year for the next six years. His name would then be placed on an inactive list for another two years, unless – as the recruiter who visited his high school had explained – our country needed his skills during a natural disaster or a college riot. […] But two-day weekends became four-day weekends, two weeks stretched to three weeks, and full college tuition shrank to half the tuition for vocational school. Alan grew disenchanted with the National Guard, and […] he was given a general discharge. His name was still placed on an inactive duty list – a roster he was told was only for an unprecedented national disaster that active-duty soldiers couldn’t handle alone. […] He packed away his uniform, and none of us ever thought about it again. Until last month. Alan received orders to report for “involuntary” duty on Sept. 12. In Iraq. For a year and a half: 545 days to be exact, with two possible extensions.
Next, I was reading PlanetSun, the aggregation of blogs for folks at Sun Microsystems, and I came across a piece by David Kordsmeier about his thoughts on coming across his (fairly unusual) name in the list of US casualties in Iraq. It’s a moving piece, worth reading slowly and thoughtfully.
And then, as so often, I turned to Terry, and read his short piece on the moral issue at the core of sending someone to war. This is from an interview with Stephen Fry, quoting Bertrand Russell, as cited in Neil Gaiman’s blog (and that pretty much captures the magic of the web right there):
“Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice.
Exactly. (See also my earlier piece on War and Morality.)