It is Veteran’s Day, which long ago they used to call Armistice Day, which is where the poppy came from:
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row.
The VFW and the Legion have been using poppies to celebrate Veterans Day since before I was born.
I have spent a week trying to decide to post a piece I wrote last week. That was when I received an email from my son. It said simply that one of his best friends who had come home from Iraq had recently been decorated for one of the Pentagon’s highest honors. He would not talk about it much, even to my son and I had to find the story of his bravery on the Net. I was going to use my son’s friend and another soldier who died that week as the centerpiece for a post I had titled, “Two Came Home.”
Something in me, however, would not let me post it. My son and I exchanged emails, especially about whether his friend would want me to use his name. He said he’d ask, but by then I had made up my mind not to run the post. We have had too many people appropriating the lives of servicemen and women in Iraq to make points that maybe those people themselves would not want to make. Clint Eastwood got it about right in Flags of Our Fathers, his film about the Medal of Honor winners who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. If you’ve served in a war there are those who think they own you.
This time a year ago, certain neocon chickenhawks were blaming the Bush Administration for misconduct of the war, like actors in a bad television drama. From the early days of this war, when soldiers openly reported not having enough body armor or protection for their Humvees, to the questions of military commanders on the ground about why we abandoned Fallujah, to the controversy over the soldier we left behind in the hands of some shady militia group, to the current penchant for blaming everything on the departed Donald Rumsfeld, the conduct of this war has been questioned not just by grand-standing, armchair quarterbacks comfortable on the home front, but by the troops themselves.
Perhaps not since the Civil War have basic military tactics been so openly and seriously argued within the military chain of command. To do so is to break an unwritten, even sacred code. Colin Powell knew this and when it finally became too much he resigned his “commission.” It was a move only a career soldier can really understand.
Shortly after 9/11, neocon Kenneth Adelman said calling Islam a peaceful religion “is an increasingly hard argument to make.” Adelman, who at the time served on the Bush Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board continued “The more you examine the religion, the more militaristic it seems. After all, its founder, Mohammed, was a warrior, not a peace advocate like Jesus.” On the December 6, 2001, edition of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports Adelman said:
I don’t agree that you need an enormous number of American troops. I think that reviewing the bidding, that you look at what Saddam Hussein did in 1991. He was not a great fighter. His army is down to one-third than it was before, and I think it would be a cakewalk.
In a 2006 Vanity Fair interview Adelman admitted he was wrong, but it wasn’t his fault. According to a Maureen Dowd column, he “presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.” He goes on to say, “the idea of using our power for moral good in the world” is finished, at least for a generation. So if Iraq is the end of Mr. Adelman’s morality, what does he propose to substitute for it?
Adelman’s comment Still stands as the ultimate cop-out by those who pounded the war drums. It smacks of cowardice and in his world, even treason. There isn’t even about Adelman’s statements the ambivalent gutlessness and fear of that soldier in Saving Private Ryan who lets his comrades die, then hides in the rubble, only to emerge after the battle is over to point his rifle at a group of surrendering enemy soldiers and finally pull the trigger.
Americans all know neither party currently has a collective solution to the end of this war, even in the midst of the finger-pointing. Iraq has all the earmarks of our Civil War, where troops kept slaughtering one another by the thousands while politicians and generals muddled through. At Antietam where 23,000 Americans died on a single day–more on one day than on any other day in any American war–they just kept firing at each other, even bayoneting their foes until blood flowed down the Sunken Road and soldiers said after the battle you could not walk across some fields and have your feet touch the ground, there were so many mangled bodies. There does stand one important difference in these two civil wars: Abraham Lincoln maintained a personal moral clarity about the American Civil War even as he sat in his office and heard the sounds of firing squads executing deserters on the other side of the Potomac. This president and the Iraq war–as Ken Adelman admits–have no such moral clarity.
So why then do people continue to serve in Iraq? I will not presume to answer for them. Some of them have already spoken quite eloquently in books, articles, and interviews about their feelings. One is by the same publisher who did my book. It is titled Fighting for Fallujah and provides some incredible firsthand accounts of what it is like to fight in Iraq. When I think about Iraq I think about an e-mail a soldier sent to his aunt shortly before he died, describing his hope for an end to the fighting. “We will be able to lay down our arms and breathe real peace and feel no fear,” he wrote.
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