Cost of War


No photoshopping here--this is a picture I came across over the weekend, part of a slideshow documenting the very grim reality of war--the sort of grim reality the pro-war crowd reacts to with equal measures of denial and blind fury at those whose work makes it impossible to deny.

It's a testament to the war-at-all-costs crowd's fury that the photographers who insist on chronicling this reality are as often as not punished, usually by some suspension of their livelihood. That's because their photographs often obliterate, in the most stark and clear way possible, the mythology of combat central to the pro-war ilk's deranged mental outlook.

The picture above stuck with me precisely because it runs as counter as you can get to the myth of the heroic warrior death. There is no climactic mass carnage on a glorious field of battle, no epic action or event, no whispered requests to a loyal comrade asking that word be passed to a loved one that it was for a good cause...nope, just a single, solitary casualty who suffered the worst of all possibilities in a filthy Fallujah hell-hole.

I can't help but wonder how this individual, this once living, breathing person, would have reacted had, somehow, his death had been foretold. Maybe not any different at all; however, I really don't believe that anyone, even soldiers who live with death on a daily basis, would be content with a final end in such a manner. I don't know--perhaps others think or feel differently.

I do know that this sort of myth busting, in the truest sense of the term, reveals the level of derangement on the part of the pro-war types. Since reality will never match up to the mythology of combat, they insist upon denying...reality, even as they pretend otherwise...e.g., George W. Bush often brays about the "violence on the teevee screens," which would be news...if the news organizations actually DID broadcast such things.