I was reading an article written by Jules Crittenden this evening and found myself feeling incredibly sad. I’m sure the article wasn’t intended to make anyone sad. Its about the privileged Barack Obama and his confusing, naive, child-like and contradictory statements about the Global War on Terrorism and the Battle of Iraq in particular. Its an excellent article, I hope you’ll read it.

I got hung up on one part of it. The part in which he compares the photos of the college students to whom Obama was speaking and the ‘dead eyes’ of our military men and women. You see, Obama made this statement to the college students:

DePaul is now filled with students who have not spent a single day on campus without the reality of a war in Iraq. Four classes have matriculated and four classes have graduated since this war began. And we are reminded that America’s sons and daughters in uniform, and their families, bear the heavy burden.

Crittenden then went on to point out quite eloquently and with photos that none - NONE - of those college students have lived with the reality of a war in Iraq unless it is vicariously through someone they know who is serving the country.

This is a point I have attempted to make myself repeatedly in this blog but much less eloquently. Those who serve are serving alone. Very alone. The rest of the country is not at war. Most seem blissfully unaware we are at war at all.

I haven’t written much about my son on this blog recently. There are several reasons for that. He doesn’t want me to write anything about him without his prior approval and its hard to do that when his internet connection is poor, sporadic and as of the last couple of weeks non-existent. Not to mention that when I have been able to talk with him online, I haven’t been thinking of this blog.

The last pictures he sent me before his internet connection went out completely were photos of his ‘ceremony’ when he was promoted to Captain, about a month ago. It was just a couple of poor quality photos of what we would hardly call a ceremony. Just him and a superior officer pinning his new rank on his uniform. But then, he’s in a war zone and I was kind of surprised they made any attempt at a ceremony.

In the photo my son looks very different than he did the last time I saw him. He looks much older. He’s in fatigues, in a dingy room standing at attention. He looks dusty and very tired. He has a gun in a holster strapped loosely over his shoulder at an angle so that it can be quickly drawn with his opposite hand.

When I got to the part of Jules Crittenden’s article about the college students giving a sympathetic tilt of the head and a ‘it sucks to be you’ kind of look when the Soldiers were mentioned, I thought of those pictures. I clicked on the link that anchored the text ‘dead eyes‘ and read what another young Soldier wrote about being in Iraq. I’ve read that blog many times before but haven’t in a long time.

You see, the war seems to be portrayed at two extremes. Either our Soldiers are over there doing good deeds constantly for the indigenous population or they are monsters. There are sides in a civil war in this country. One side portrays the acts of our Soldiers as horrific and cruel. The other side practically anoints them with sainthood. The truth is in the middle somewhere. The truth is they are American men and women doing the best they can in a horrible situation. They are our sons and daughters and deserve our respect and gratitude for being willing to stand and deliver knowing it would be a rough go.

The Soldiers’ blogs for the most part are much more accurate depictions of what is actually happening there. For a mother with a son there they can be hard to read at times.

I feel guilty for emotionally backing off the day-to-day reading of the blogs of Soldiers and vigilantly keeping up with the events of the war. In the beginning I swore I would hang in there every day my son had to. I swore that if my son could stand being there then the least I could do is stand to read and write about it. I have the luxury of backing off when it feels too heavy to bear. My son doesn’t have that luxury.

Over the past 15 months I’ve talked with my son periodically on the computer, he’s sent me pictures and I’ve watched him subtlety and gradually change. The process of change almost imperceptible. At some level I must have known it but couldn’t let it into my consciousness because as he’s changed I’ve backed off emotionally from the war. Its so much easier to keep it at a theoretical level than to imagine someone shooting at my child.

Reading the words of Jules Crittenden’s article and the article at Acute Politics made me very sad because I know my son has changed.

He’s been gone for three years and in Baghdad, Iraq for the past 15 months of those three years. I see those dead eyes in his photos. I wonder if I know my son anymore.

My favorite Tanker on Foot Patrol
tanker

Thanks for the quote at Consul-At-Arms