The Fever Victims

In the media and therefore probably in Washington, there seems to be a trend or let's say an increasing awareness of the human cost--at least the American human cost--of the war in Iraq.

It's a theme in coverage these days, with John Kerry's 1971 question about Vietnam (How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?) frequently if not obsessively cited. The anguish fuels the misguided efforts to reignite the draft, as if adding more bodies to the count would help. But the anguish is more prominent than ever before, as the War Fever has broken and reality of war sets in.

The reality of this war is that the now nearly 3,000 combat deaths is the tip of the iceberg. There don't seem to be solid figures on the wounded--perhaps 25,000 wounded in combat, perhaps 50,000 total, or as many as 100,000. But one report I caught this week estimated that as many of half of the wounded will not fully recover. Medical technology saves lives, but adds to the number of disabled and seriously and permanently injured.

All this results in more attempts to tell the personal stories, as Meteor Blades did at Daily Kos. He writes about Vietnam as well, in particular about two outstanding young men who were killed within weeks of arriving in Vietnam. I personally knew a young man who met that fate. He was in my class in college. Most of my contemporaries are veterans of that conflict one way or another--the war vets, the antiwar vets, and those whose lives were in one way or another formed and deformed by the military and the draft. I'm not comparing the experience of being under fire in Vietnam with marching on Washington, but I am noting that from that time forward war is always personal to me.

Meteor Blades front page diary includes this map of where the young soldiers who died in Iraq came from. It's pretty interesting, in that many of the clusters are in traditionally Democratic areas, including the "San Francisco values" part of California. This has always been a smoke and mirrors war by a smoke and mirrors administration. Republicans with their moral rhetoric assume the patriotic high ground, but it's all talk, it's basically hypocrisy and lies.

The photos of young people whose lives have been snuffed out--often the portraits we associate with high school yearbook photos--are heartbreaking enough, just because of how young they are. But the photo below also caught my imagination, because of the reality behind the cliche--a rabid football fan (in this case, of the Pittsburgh Steelers), shedding his shirt in sub-freezing weather. But the young man in this photo (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette caption tells us) is James Montgomery, in the stands at Heinz Field. He's just returned from active duty in Iraq. It's his 30th birthday. The Steelers are sticking it to the Cleveland Browns. In Iraq, soldiers don heavy armor in heat that gets considerably about 100F. To this young man, the freezing cold must have felt like life itself.

His war is not over. It never will be. We have no idea of what is in store for him. We hope he manages his life, and should he need help for medical and psychological problems, that he gets it. War, especially in this age of high tech weaponry and exotic chemicals, etc., war is the curse that keeps on killing. This new concentration on the soldiers whose lives are inevitably changed, even when not ended, is fitting. But it should have been a much bigger consideration before this all started. And it ought to be joined by consideration for the thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed, and the millions displaced--their lives will never be the same either. The time to remember all this isn't just now. It's the next time someone tries to reignite War Fever.