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Tick-marks
Oct. 24th, 2005 09:05 pmSometime this week we pass another milestone.
It happens for all of us, someday, we move from the rolls of the quick to the roster of the dead.
But, at some point this week, or, at the latest, next, 2,000 people in the military will have died in Iraq.
Two-thousand. A drop in the bucket which was Vietnam. Nothing as compared to WW2, and almost trivial when one thinks of the Civil War (Antietam had 3,600 dead. Some 17,000 wounded. From of a total of 93,000 engaged, all in an afternnon; for one battle. Ponder that. We have only half again that many troops on the ground in Iraq right now, imagine almost one-third of them were hors de combat tomorrow), but still, that's a lot of dead.
More than Katrina (so far), almost as many as died on That Tuesday.
Each of them with families, friends, lovers.
Each of them cut short. The kids, the old men (at least one of them was in his early fifties), all of them expected to have years past these, most could count on decades. What did we lose when they died?
Yes, dying is part of the deal. When one joins the Army one promises to let the Gov't send one to places where other people will try to kill you. Seems only fair, as you get to try and kill them. That part of it doesn't bother me. We each made a choice, and some of us have to pay the piper for the right to dance.
But these deaths, they touch me. These are my deaths. These are my comrades, God forbid, they are my friends. One of that list came from my unit. Some of them died in places I was, or with unit I was serving with.
Veterans' day is coming, which for me isn't Veterans', but rather Armistice Day, when the world hoped to do without war again, and remembered the horrible price paid, in blood, and youth (for the death of an age, or perhaps several ages, came in the trenches, a loss of innocence we thought we'd managed to gain; at horrid price, in Viet-nam, but seem to have forgotten, like the mythic regaining of virgnity after a time of abstinence).
I don't ask that I be sent to heroic wars, nor even clean wars. I only ask that the cause be just, as Shakespeare put it in Henry V.
WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.
We are a democratic republic, we have no King to fob the guilt onto, the burden for those who fall in unjust wars rests on all of us.
When the number ticks, think of that, you may, like me, decide to empty a glass. I'll be doing it for absent friends, some of you will do it for memories sake, some of us ought to be doing it for the brief, nepenthic, relief it gives.
It happens for all of us, someday, we move from the rolls of the quick to the roster of the dead.
But, at some point this week, or, at the latest, next, 2,000 people in the military will have died in Iraq.
Two-thousand. A drop in the bucket which was Vietnam. Nothing as compared to WW2, and almost trivial when one thinks of the Civil War (Antietam had 3,600 dead. Some 17,000 wounded. From of a total of 93,000 engaged, all in an afternnon; for one battle. Ponder that. We have only half again that many troops on the ground in Iraq right now, imagine almost one-third of them were hors de combat tomorrow), but still, that's a lot of dead.
More than Katrina (so far), almost as many as died on That Tuesday.
Each of them with families, friends, lovers.
Each of them cut short. The kids, the old men (at least one of them was in his early fifties), all of them expected to have years past these, most could count on decades. What did we lose when they died?
Yes, dying is part of the deal. When one joins the Army one promises to let the Gov't send one to places where other people will try to kill you. Seems only fair, as you get to try and kill them. That part of it doesn't bother me. We each made a choice, and some of us have to pay the piper for the right to dance.
But these deaths, they touch me. These are my deaths. These are my comrades, God forbid, they are my friends. One of that list came from my unit. Some of them died in places I was, or with unit I was serving with.
Veterans' day is coming, which for me isn't Veterans', but rather Armistice Day, when the world hoped to do without war again, and remembered the horrible price paid, in blood, and youth (for the death of an age, or perhaps several ages, came in the trenches, a loss of innocence we thought we'd managed to gain; at horrid price, in Viet-nam, but seem to have forgotten, like the mythic regaining of virgnity after a time of abstinence).
I don't ask that I be sent to heroic wars, nor even clean wars. I only ask that the cause be just, as Shakespeare put it in Henry V.
WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.
We are a democratic republic, we have no King to fob the guilt onto, the burden for those who fall in unjust wars rests on all of us.
When the number ticks, think of that, you may, like me, decide to empty a glass. I'll be doing it for absent friends, some of you will do it for memories sake, some of us ought to be doing it for the brief, nepenthic, relief it gives.
