Soapbox

Mourning Our Loss

I wrote a letter to my paper yesterday. Ok, I write a letter to my paper a lot of days, but in this one- wonder of wonders- I thanked them for a little section they ran that day. (Hey, it happens from time to time. I believe if you’re going to complain about the bad stuff, you should compliment the good stuff too.) 14 marines from Ohio have just been killed in Iraq and in addition to photos of the young, ernest, sometimes scared looking guys in their marine corps best, they ran profiles.

~ Cpl Boskovitch had just set a wedding date and his fiancee was going to have invitations and flowers and tuxedo ideas to show him when he got home in October.

~Corporal Montgomery’s body will be escorted home by his brother who is in the same batallion, who will be attending two funerals when he gets home because their father died just 2 days earlier.

~Lance cpl. Cifuentes was studying to be a teacher when his Reserve unit got activated and sent to Iraq.

~Cpl. Kreuter was looking forward to saying hello to his infant son, who will now never hear the sound of his father’s voice.

I read these stories with tears in my eyes for these men, not much older than my son. They are NOt just body counts: not facts and statistics. They are loves and dreams and lives of service to others that were erased completely between one heartbeat and the next.

Maybe this subject has particular urgency for me because I remember becoming so calloused by the nightly body counts of the Vietnam War that when the Kent State shootings were announced, I wondered what all the fuss was about. After all, it was only 4, and 4 is a small number, right?

We’re so used to huge numbers in this country that they have lost much of their meaning. We’re so accustomed to discussions of millions here, billions there that even 2,000 seems insignificant, let alone 14. Of course, one is a huge and hideous number when it is your one who is gone. We all need to remember that.

In an era when we aren’t allowed to see the caskets, when Nightline wasn’t even able to say the NAMES of these people without being accused of being liberal anti-american agitators, I thanked the editor for reminding us that however righteous or ignoble the cause, each life lost in war lessens us all. Whether you support or are appalled by this war, we as a nation must try to feel at least an echo of the very personal loss these families feel, so we can honor what we’ve been given.

Only when you appreciate the nature of the gift can you be trusted to use that gift wisely. Sadly, I think that is part of the President’s problem. He has no empathy for the loss the nation suffers every time another name goes on the list. I’m afraid they’re all just numbers to him, and he has some set amount in his head that he figures is statisticaly an acceptable “loss” in a business sense of the term. He doesn’t get it: these aren’t numbers, they are people.

How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? Which one will be the one that finally matters?

They all should, to all of us.