Costs of War

Regarding my previous post: already I'm reaping a benefit from Riverbend's post and link to The Angry Arab. Not only is today's post both informative and funny, but Khalil linked Tuesday to this poignant article from the Progressive magazine entitled The Ultimate Betrayal, by Howard Zinn.

Zinn sees the big picture: young boys, and today, young boys and young women, are routinely lied to when summoned to war. From the days of the American Revolution, when Washington dined extravagently while the rank and file clothed themselves in rags, to today's stop-loss orders, shortages of kevlar vests--and the continued policy of the Bush Administration to mostly ignore those who've either paid the ultimate or penultimate price for their folly--the rich profit while the poor do all the work:

Excerpt: Those who come back alive, but blind or without arms or legs, find that the Bush Administration is cutting funds for veterans. Bush's State of the Union address, while going through the usual motions of thanking those serving in Iraq, continued his policy of ignoring the fact that thousands have come back wounded, in a war that is becoming increasingly unpopular.

The quick Thanksgiving visit of Bush to Iraq, much ballyhooed in the press, was seen differently by an army nurse in Landstuhl, Germany, where casualties from the war are treated. She sent out an e-mail: "My 'Bush Thanksgiving' was a little different. I spent it at the hospital taking care of a young West Point lieutenant wounded in Iraq. . . . When he pressed his fists into his eyes and rocked his head back and forth he looked like a little boy. They all do, all nineteen on the ward that day, some missing limbs, eyes, or worse. . . . It's too bad Bush didn't add us to his holiday agenda. The men said the same, but you'll never read that in the paper."

As for Jeremy Feldbusch, blinded in the war, his hometown of Blairsville, an old coal mining town of 3,600, held a parade for him, and the mayor honored him. I thought of the blinded, armless, legless soldier in Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun, who, lying on his hospital cot, unable to speak or hear, remembers when his hometown gave him a send-off, with speeches about fighting for liberty and democracy. He finally learns how to communicate, by tapping Morse Code letters with his head, and asks the authorities to take him to schoolrooms everywhere, to show the children what war is like. But they do not respond. "In one terrible moment he saw the whole thing," Trumbo writes. "They wanted only to forget him."

In a sense, the novel was asking, and now the returned veterans are asking, that we don't forget.