Night after night, the faces of American servicemen killed in Iraq come up on my television screen, in silence, at the end of the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Invariably, they are young faces, identified with name, rank, hometown and age.
The list begins now with Abad, Roberto, corporal, Marine Corps, 22, Los Angeles, killed in action in Najaf, Aug. 6, 2004, and ends with Zyla, Michael S., staff sergeant, U.S. Army, 32, Elgin, Oregon, killed with three others by a roadside bomb in Taji, Dec. 13, 2005.
Between them are 2,316 other soldiers, sailors and marines killed in these last three years, nearly all in their teens and 20s. Another 17,269 have been blinded or have had legs and arms blown off or suffered other dreadful wounds.
Why? I ask again and again as the faces of the young dead pass in front of me on the screen. For what good purpose did they keep what Alan Seegar called their “rendezvous with death?”
Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, as George W. Bush told us he did to justify sending American forces to Iraq three years ago. Saddam had not bought nuclear materials from Niger, as George W. Bush told us. And Iraq was not teeming with al-Qaida terrorists, as George W. Bush told us then, and is still telling us. He still claims that if we were not going after al-Qaida in Iraq, we would be fighting them on St. Charles Avenue or some other American street.
From all that I have read, those were and are outrageous claims – outright lies, in fact and no justification at all for the carnage he has visited upon the people of Iraq and on America’s sons and daughters in uniform.
Forty years ago, Presidents Johnson and Nixon escalated a civil war in Vietnam into a disastrous American military adventure in Southeast Asia, and on grounds that were as flimsy – and untruthful. Forty years ago, however, protest against that war escalated apace, largely growing out of student demonstrations on college and university campuses.
In this week of the beginning of the fourth year of the war, in my walks across campus I’ve seen students strolling to class, politicking for the SGA or just hanging out in the sun. Were any of them thinking about the men and women their age being killed and maimed by rockets and roadside bombs half a world away? Where was the outrage that their parents or their parents’ older brothers and sisters took into the streets 40 years ago?
Maybe that generation was less altruistic than I remember it. For years, we males were expected to serve in the armed forces. We registered for the draft when we were 18 and waited to be called up for two years in the infantry, enlisted – a four-year tour in the Navy, Air Force or Marines; three years in the Army – or, as George W. Bush did, joined a Reserve or National Guard unit for six months on active duty and five and half years as a “citizen soldier.”
None of those options were particularly onerous as long as the country was at peace, as it was when I put in my three years, one month and nine days; many of us even chose to stay in the Reserves beyond our obligation. But that changed as more and more men were drafted, rushed through basic training and into the jungles of Vietnam – first as advisers to the South Vietnamese, then as a full-fledged fighting army.
And it was then that the chants began and grew louder:
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
“One, two, three, four, we don’t want your f—— war!”
Was that altruism? Perhaps the chanters were less concerned with principle than they were with saving their own skins. Perhaps.
What concerns me as I cross the Peace Quad, is that the campus is all too peaceful. I fear that the Bush administration will interpret the silence here and elsewhere as acceptance and, looking to Iran or North Korea or even China, commit more young men and women to “a rendezvous with Death/At midnight in some flaming town/ When Spring trips north again.”
And for what good purpose?
Larry Lorenz is the A. Louis Read Distinguished Professor of Communications.
