The Things They Carried

My girlfriend lent me the book "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien. It's his account of his experiences in the vietnam war. He was drafted in '68 after he graduated from college. His accounts are harrowing, humerous, vivid, and clear. He puts war right in front of you, cutting through the politics and the ideals, or lack their of,behind the war. An example:

"But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons...You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gun-ship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing."

He writes of nearly dodging the draft in Canada. He describes his Lt. Commander and wrestling with his conscious after he loses one of his men.
I grew up after Vietnam was in the past. The ideas supporting the war were confusing to me. Communism was not something I really feared. The Soviets might have been a declared "enemy", but I never really understood why.

Naturally, as I read this, I make comparisons to the war on Iraq. We have men and women, barely old enough to drink, giving their lives for the country. Civilians and combatants alike are also being killed, and are often lost in the shadows of American lives. Whether you think these sacrifices are worth it, is of course a matter of controversy and debate. The circumstances of the two conflicts are different, but the costs are the same: human lives.

I have always been mixed on the war. On a theoretical level, I could understand it. Saddam was an awful dictator who did unimaginably cruel things to his people. Ridding Iraq of him is certaintly not a bad thing, regardless of whether the infamous "weapons of mass destruction" ever existed.
But I have always questioned whether we could actually succeed in stablizing the country. To succeed it would have to be done with care and with careful planning.

It's possible of course, that twenty, or even 50 years from now, Iraq will be a better place. We don't know. It's possible that the lives that have been sacrificed have prevented more deaths under Saddam's continued rule. But it could easily spiral further downhill. We'll see more violence and more bloodshed. It could "stablize" as the breeding ground for terrorists that the war's critics have often predicted.

So now we must once again, proceed with caution. We must remember those soldiers in the line of fire who don't care about politics. At that moment, they are from both red and blue states. They are democrats, republicans, Iraqis, Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis: they are human. We must always ask, are their lives worth it?