Thoughts after House to House, Thoughts on War

After finishing House to House by David Bellavia, I wiped tears from my cheeks and thanked God that I was blessed with the crises that plague my life. I lament stupid diet decisions (a meatball sub instead of a grilled chicken wrap, oh no!) and the various false starts of my work ethic. Never in my days have I had to smack a doped up Islamic extremist in the face with a Kevlar helmet right before he attempted to bite my nuts off. Bellavia's outstanding memoir of his time in Iraq, focusing on the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, recounts such an encounter, a moment shortly before he kills his enemy in a grisly, deliberate fashion.

The Iraq War and War on Terror are voting issues for me. McCain says he refuses time tables and he is fine if we carry out this conflict for the next hundred years. Right. So don't vote for that guy!

Regardless of how you feel about War with a capital letter, I urge you to pursue the endless volumes of knowledge out there and form your beliefs based on something headier than the crap I usually hear when people talk about armed conflict. "Well, people should stop killing each other, man! War is bad, you know?"

I know, man. Pass the bong!

A real statement on the meaning of war is difficult to compose unless you can appropriately assess how you would act someone handed you a rifle as a bearded zealot ran toward you with a bomb wrapped around his chest, Allah and murder in his eyes. Don't worry that you have no idea. According to the Newsweek piece excerpted from Fareed Zakaria's book, The Post-American World, the world is safer now as a whole than it has ever been. Zakaria presents a compelling argument for this, although I'll have to do some more research so see if I really swallow it. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people, even people working every day in Iraq, who do not have such first-hand knowledge , so it's hardly a crime on your part.

We are modern humans living in a post-Enlightenment age. You and I know that ripping another's life away is wrong. I hear the pitter-patter of Birkenstocks, but I think we must not surrender to naiveté as a salute to our love for our fellow humans. Loving your children means setting rules and boundaries, issuing discipline or hugs as required by the situation. As your brother, your son, your lover, and your ally and enemy, I hope no one reading this thinks I speak too obviously when I say what I believe you already know: there must be soldiers.

Someone must carry the rifle or sword. Someone must stand on that wall, run in those boots, clean that ammunition. Float your fingered peace signs. Dance with flowers in your hair, and move to San Francisco. Somewhere, someone angrier than you, stronger than you, someone with more hate in his heart will exploit your kindness and goodness. Before he strikes-- or at least as soon as he strikes-- he must feel a soldier's boot on his throat if freedom from oppression and tyranny is to continue to gain a foothold around the world.

"An AC-130 Spectre gunship rumbles overhead and spits out greetings to the insurgents with its whirling Gatling guns and 105mm howitzer. There is nothing more terrifying than the sight and sounds of that gunship. With its wings banked, it unloads an unbelievable barrage of bullets and shells into its targets. 'Grrrr... Boom-Boom... Grrrrr....' The AC-130 is the closest man has come in imitation to the fist of God."

Humans are amazing. We are jaded by MTV and PS3, but if you take a breath, I hope you can still astound yourself with our capabilities. It was one of your brothers in nature who ripped an atom apart, one of your brothers who played golf on the moon. I can, right now, use Skype to learn Chinese by speaking to someone in China. We have bent the world around us to our wills, and the testament to human dignity and the power of higher intellect manifests in our temples to Mammon and God, our medical marvels, and, yes, the ferocious power we can wield when we seek to destroy.

When any country wields as much concentrated might as the United States, it is imperative that we, the scions of Descartes, Kant, Aristotle, Mill, Jesus, King, and Gandhi, wield that might with restraint and respect. The more we eat from the tree of knowledge, the higher the standards we must hold for ourselves.

This we have not done.

Read about the disgusting politics that precipitated from that horrible Tuesday morning in 2001, the so-called War on Terror, in Ron Suskind's One Percent Doctrine. Read about Wolfowitz's, Rumsfield's, Cheney's, Rice's, and Bush's presumptuous, despicable misunderstanding of the war Americans would face and the costly mistakes they made when they sounded the bugle for war in Thomas Ricks's Fiasco. Watch No End in Sight for more of the same. For extra fun, watch Spike Lee's When the Levies Broke to reinforce what happens when good will and capital are misspent. Then read Enemies and learn about the threats our government leaders ignored in their pursuit of Saddam Hussein-- good stuff like that in One Percent Doctrine and Fiasco as well.

(For that matter, read the Bob Woodward books on President Bush. Do not call President Bush and idiot or a puppet. It removes his accountability, obscures his monstrosity. Besides, George W. Bush can't be THAT stupid: he's the President of the United States. "So what?" some people say. And you're... what? A partner at your firm? A mill worker? A second unit director? A nanny? A chronic masturbator? Give credit where it's due, and don't steal accountability from such a man, a man who has so completely failed in the most important of his life's duties.)

Through all the murk surrounding the Iraq War, there are men on the ground actually fighting it. These are the men who sweat and bleed, the men who die so we can have this discussion. At NYU I heard a lot of people bitch about the President and the war, people who don't know the difference between officers and enlisted, who don't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. If you live in the USA, it's your right to say what you want, even if you're Heidi Montag-- a woman who I feel perhaps should have her tongue removed-- but I would submit that if you don't know what or where Al Anbar is, if you don't know who Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army are, and if you flinch at an American body bag without smelling for a whiff on context, you should probably stop talking about the war and go back to watching Dancing with the Stars. You look stupid.

There are real heroes on the ground over there. There are courageous warriors persevering through chaos and tragedy unlike that which any outside the uniformed services have ever known. It's impossible for any of us who have not struggled through the fire and smoke and din of combat to even consider what the word might mean for people like David Bellavia, who endured the fiercest fighting of the Iraq War. Thanks to House to House, a book that often found me forgetting to blink or swallow, we can have some idea.

In an appendix, Bellavia seems to argue for staying in Iraq until the mission is done, the McCain point of view:

"Crtitics of the war only offend me when they misconstrue passion of the mission for some jingoistic partisan dogma. I lost some of the most beautiful people I will ever know in this struggle. They had dreams. They had children and wives, mothers and fathers. And they volunteered to go and fight, two and three times in succession, for a purpose. For me personally, there is no other way I can honor their commitment without supporting an honorable completion of the mission for which they perished."

Here, the water is murky. In our current economic crisis, do we honor the living or the dead by spending billions each month on the war in Iraq? By pulling out are we spitting on the graves of those who died for our freedom in Fallujah? Do we fight until the IIF has enough organization and morale to continue the mission in the absence of an American armed presence, or do we own up to the mistakes by our leadership, i.e. President Bush and his Entourage of Evil, and redouble our efforts in pursuit of the real enemies.

After all, the enemies in Fallujah were imported. Bellavia calls them the insurgent all-star team: Czech, Pilipino, Saudi, Pakistani, and more. The hateful Islamic zealots are merely fauceting in Iraq. Would America not honor the dead more by making good on the promises of September, 2001, the promises that inspired men like Bellavia to join the military in the first place? It's not that we don't have the money, power, intelligence, or resources to fight the right fight. It's that those things are tied up in Iraq's red herring. In an ugly way, it's almost as if Iraq and September 11 cancel each other out. Can America stomach another mass deployment of troops, even to chase Osama Bin Laden, even in the name of the Twin Towers? I don't think we can.

Even so, without reading such dramatic first-hand accounts as David Bellavia's, we are merely ranting from Ivory Towers. I encourage you to pick up a copy for yourself so when you speak of ending or continuing war you can speak with authority, not merely on the gases of mistaken media input. I can't recommend House to House highly enough.