From my vacation perch last week on the sands of Long Beach Island, I watched as fishing boats ran for port, dolphins danced off the jetties, and surfers sat on waves waiting for the curl. But there was another parade if you looked closely enough, taking time from that summer potboiler and lazy sunshine: the big, new Boeing C-17 troop-lifters out of McGuire Air Force Base out on the edge of the pine barrens. Massive and slow, they lumbered from the shore, gray-green and dark. They were headed east, away from the sun.
McGwire AFB borders Fort Dix, one of the oldest military reservations in the eastern United States, named for Major General John Adams Dix, a veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Civil War, as well as a United States Senator, Secretary of the Treasury, Minister to France and Governor of New York (talk about a political resume). For decades regular Army, Fort Dix is now a huge training ground and deployment zone for reservists: as such, the pipeline from the eastern states to Fort Dix to McGuire to Iraq has been a virtual highway of young American men and women over the past two years. When it was built to train World War I troops, Fort Dix was far from civilization, huddle in the desolate scrub pine forests between New York and Philly. When I was a kid, I remember riding past the back gate along Route 539 and saluting. Now, of course, suburbia is knocking on the barbed wire fences, and fast-growing southern Jersey is providing reservist manpower.
I was thinking of the stark contrast between the young people in those C-17s and the ones on the beach, frollicking in the waves. What family circumstances, opportunities in life, monetary situations - or heeded calls to service - created the obvious gulf? And why do we continually shirk the cold facts of this war: that it ha failed, that we have lost (at least in our stated purpose if not on the battlefield), and that it brings discredit to both this Administration and to all of us? Why do we simply "go on with our lives" - as George Bush so infamously said in response to the vigil kept by a Gold Star mother on his own endless vacation last week - as if going on with our lives, being consumers, hitting those waves and those mountain bikes were some kind of call to liberty, some kind of national moral responsibility in the name of freedom?
Bush's quotes, frankly, summed up what we all tend to think: they serve, we don't, war is hell, let's move on. (Oh, perhaps a support-our-troops magnet for the RV). They were shocking not because a President of the United State uttered them; not because the man who sent these men and women to die on a cheap bet and a political lie said them; but because they fairly represent the attitude-at-large of our sated, careless population.
I feel disgusted: certainly with our President, but also with our Congress, our institutions, our media, our people, myself. We do not serve, and we really don't care beyond a few crocodile tears and tut-tuts about those who do; and we do not seem to care about the utter waste, not just of 1,800 lives but of 10,000 wounds, and tens of thousands of Iraqis. That one small woman's vigil in rural Texas should cause a stir - and a vicious, anti-woman, anti-American backlash from the hard-fascist right - is itself an indictment of all of us. Slow news month, President on the ranch...oh right, the cost of the war. Let's lead with it. Let's empathize with this "mom." Let's bow to our basest reality-show faux emotions. It takes Cindy Sheehan and her grief for us to remember the war.
When I got back from the shore, Fred Wilson sent me an article by E.L. Doctorow in the East Hampton Star (fine weekly after my own heart) and remarked that it read like some of my previous posts on Bush and the war. High compliment. The full article is here; this is an excerpt I particularly admire:
I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
