Two thousand American soldiers, Sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have now given their lives fighting in Iraq – whether that number encompasses only combat deaths or deaths by mischance or accident is immaterial: They went there to fight for their country and as a result of that service they died. Now we mourn them.
There’s a power in round numbers, a kind of symbolism. Certain people have been waiting for this inevitable death. It is the initiating death that sets their plans in motion. His life was his alone, but his death they have claimed for themselves. He had a life. He has become a name. And more than that, he has now become a symbol.
And even though I am aware of the power of symbols, I find all of this somehow intrusive, unseemly and inappropriate, this branding together of a man and a number. It smacks a little too much of that old murderer Stalin, who famously exclaimed, “One man’s death is a tragedy, one million a statistic,” because it tries somehow to reach a dialectic synthesis between the man and the number and in doing so immorally overreaches the form. Because it now becomes important to be certain of to whom the actual 2000th death belonged, hinting as though perhaps his sacrifice was more important than whoever died 1999th , or whoever might die tomorrow. When what we all really want to know is when is it all going to end? Who will be last?
I’m just about dead solid certain that whenever it is the last American dies in Iraq, Time magazine will do a special edition all about him, and his life, and his death – Although I am loth to draw comparisons between this conflict and Vietnam, the media is not, and I still remember reading the story of the last soldier to die there when I was just a child. I looked at his young face and tried to imagine what his life was like, and how he died and what on earth did all of it mean. It was powerful, and so I think they will probably do this again when the time comes, because as journalists are wont to do these days, they will think that rather than reporting the news, they are writing the first draft of history. It is so important to be first.
And speaking of the media, did you note the headline of that first WaPo link: “Military has lost 2000 in Iraq.” The military did. I thought perhaps the country did too, but it seems: No.
Whoever that last soldier is, he too will become a symbol, the “everyman” stand-in for each of those who went before. The question then will be, “What have we accomplished with all of this killing, and all of this dying?” For such a great expenditure in blood and treasure, what will we have bought?
The answer might be, “We have brought freedom and democracy to a place that never dared to dream of it. We have brought fear into the hearts of those who would use ideology or religion or mere terror to enslave the minds and brutalize the bodies of their countrymen. We have demonstrated that we will fight and sacrifice and if need be die to protect our own freedoms. We have earned the right to be called the heirs of our fathers, and their fathers before them. We have passed down to our children a safer world, or at least as safe a world as we can fashion. We have done our duty the best way we could.”
That might be true, but it is not necessarily so. All this can end up having been in vain, a foolish misadventure, the harbinger of inevitable decline. The sands of Iraq could end up being the beginning of the end of American exceptionalism, the end of our cultural embrace of a quasi-mystical national faith in the destiny of the nation and what we might offer to the world when we are ruled by our better angels. We would diminish.
All of this lies in trembling consequence, and it is no stretch to believe that there are those here at home as well as many abroad that would welcome our decline. It is no stretch to believe that some of those even pursue that decline as a goal. And only some of those who do so are explicitly our enemies.
I only pray the answer will not end up being, “Having bravely attempted a foolish thing, we left 25 million people to suffer naked under the medieval tortures of 10,000 brutes because we could not bear the cost, or never stopped to even reckon it, leaving things behind us very much worse than before we came.”
I hope that will not be the case. Because if it were true, then those lives would not merely have been sacrificed, but rudely wasted. But neither is it true that we can somehow force their sacrifices into some frame of nobility merely by a dogged and sullen determination to keep killing and dying. There must be a goal in sight, and it must turn not merely on helping a poor benighted group of foreigners, but also contribute to our own security.
I think there is a goal in sight. And I think achieving that goal will make us more secure. But I have to ask myself, of what value are my thoughts against their deaths?
In the face of the mounting losses of the flower of our youth, I asked of myself recently what it would take to dislodge me from my support of seeing this through to a successful conclusion – a democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors and itself, a beacon of freedom in a dark part of the world, an ally in the continuing war on transnational, militant Islamist terrorism. And when thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that it isn’t about a number. You cannot say, “100 was an acceptable sacrifice to lay upon the altar of freedom, but 2000 is too many.” They each of them offered themselves in service to us, and a free man’s death is his alone; you cannot seize it from him to fashion for your use, and neither will their numbers admit to any symbolic rounding.
No. What would shake me from supporting the effort in Iraq would only be two things: The certainty that victory conditions are unachievable, or the knowledge that we no longer have the will to win. In the aftermath of ten million people twice risking their very lives for the privilege to wave empurpled fingers in the air, in the knowledge that the Iraqi security forces continue to gain effectiveness even as they continue to sacrifice for the own country at a rate far higher even than our own, I am not yet persuaded that the former is true. And as for the latter? Well, that depends upon our elected leadership, accountable the public opinion of you, yourself and I. Such are the glories of democratic rule, and such, when combined with the power to act, are its responsibilities.
These men and women, all two thousand of them: They are not a number. And they are emphatically none of them a symbol. They were of us and from us, each of them unique, each of them a window on the universe, now shuttered. They gave all they had, and all they ever would have because they believed in us. Those who fought most closely with them, and have seen their sacrifices close at hand, believe in the rightness of what it is that they are doing, the cause for which they gave their lives.
I think we should too.
You said it all, Cap’n. I served alongside seven who died, watched five of them die, held one as he died. They are not numbers, or symbols, and they believed in what we were doing there, and their families and their shipmates still believe. Thanks for putting into words for us.
God, you write beautifully… But, is “empurpled” a word?
I think it is now, just because Lex used it.
Beating us (and the administration) up with numbers is the medias favorite tool. Forgetting the man behind the number is normal – especially ignoring the mission that every one of these men and women have died for.
BTW – you forgot the Coast Guard – Petty Officer 3rd Class Nathan B. Bruckenthal.
Thanks, Barb – all fixed. And thank you too, Ernie and Babs.
And as for “empurpled,” yes of course it is. Which is not to say that I forever forfeit the right to make words up but… you could look it up.
I should have known better… I stand corrected!
Sir, yes sir, empurpled IS A WORD!
I believe that, whatever the number, we have already written history and that history is not represented either by a number or by one article in a paper or 2 minute clips on the nightly news. It is written every day.
for instance, quietly and with little fanfare, women have proven to be an important part of the armed forces far beyond the roles they were given in any previous war. They are more than nurses and clerks. They stand guard at watch towers and gates. They man crew served guns on trucks and humvees. They have taken the fight to the enemy on more than one occassion and most of those occasions have not garnered even a few seconds on national television or other media.
Frankly, however one feels about women in combat, the fact that it is NOT an item of comment on the nightly news tells you that it is now a reality that garners little comment or speculation above the political parties who use it as a hammering point.
We have transformed a military from a hammer to a scapel and with the ability to suture up what is destroyed DURING combat operations. We never did that in any other war, not even Vietnam. In most wars, we bombed and destroyed and gave little thought to what would need to happen until the war was largely finished. Something you can’t do when fighting an insurgency. Thus, we are transforming the concepts of guerilla warfare again.
We are writing history today because Iraq is very unlikely to fail as Vietnam failed for so many reasons that it is hard to list in a comment section. Some of the concern of the public is because many people had an unreasonable expectation that Iraq would become, as you note, this wonderful shining beacon, perfect and resembling our idea of perfect democracy. Of course, those same people have a clouded idea of what our own “perfect” democracy is and operates on. They forget things like the lincoln county wars, the lobbying of businesses and groups to get certain governors appointed in territories to serve these interests. They forget how many times those governors called out federal troops to police up the situation (usually in favor of one faction or another). They forget that the President of the day eventually ordered the federal troops not to interfere on behalf of local politics. They forget that the same thing goes on today accept that most of the wrangling is not done at gunpoint but at bank accounts and political fund raisers.
Unreasonable expectations based on a mythology of our past that many academics and activists don’t accept as the “real” American history yet some how expected Iraq to become this mythological perfection of democracy. It is, by far, the most confusing and hypocritical aspect of the criticism of the war.
Finally, in history, numbers become moot when the outcome is final, just as you say. There is no magic number that equals failure or success. How many people know how many soldiers died fighting the American Revolution? The war of 1812? The civil war? WWI, WWII? Any numbers?
If you ask the common man on the street, they couldn’t tell you. They could tell you why we fought and the outcome, but they don’t know the numbers. That’s because the price in blood can never be equal to the outcome of freedom. For those who understand, the value of freedom is not decreased by every death that it takes to achieve it and maintain it, but actually increases. it’s more like a priceless heirloom whose value increases with every year and every generation that passes.
The important thing to remember about freedom is that it can never be too expensive. That’s what is lost in the dialogue about numbers from those who continue to count them and mark every “grim milestone”. The people who count every death towards the price of freedom as diminishing it’s value would be the people who, chained on the side of the road, seeing free people walk by every day, offered the chance to be free, see that on the road of freedom they will have to figure out how to get their own food, clothing and shelter and decide that it is better to stay chained, where the food may stink, but it comes regular; their clothes may be ragged and torn, but they will get a new set every year; the shelter may be a ragged tar shack but they didn’t have to build it or find it themselves.
It’s the mind set of a slave that counts their material well being above the freedom of their spirit and intellect.
I asked in an essay, “when should we abandon freedom?”. I have wondered if Washington, having suffered defeat after defeat and having his army fall apart, would consider that the price was too high for freedom? Or the men at fort McHenry, being constantly bombarded and the last defense of the area, they must have considered at some point whether they could continue to survive and hold the fort. But they did. Now we sing the star spangled banner to commemorate their decision to hold freedom above all comfort and death. Or the men of the 54th Massachussets who marched on an on under the guns to show that the black man could indeed value and fight for freedom including giving his very life for it.
I find the whole effort of those “counting” to be instructive because I believe that this has informed me of the value that they place on their freedom and mine. Now I realize just how cheaply they would sell it.
Thanks for writing this. I had wanted to say something along these lines and simply couldn’t find a way to put it into words.
Bryan
Thank You Lex…
Like most of your really good pieces, I had to go back and read this one several times to get the total import. 1 or 2000 each one is a tragedy.
I have very mixed feeling about Iraq but that is for another time. I’m not so sure that democracy in Iraq will turn it into the “beacon” that all think it will be. Arab history shows an all too familar pattern of taking something good and screwing up…..thanks in part to the millstone of Islam, hung around their necks and which drags them down.
“Empurpled-fingers”, gives a new meaning to the one-fingered-salute we Freedom loving citizens often give to those who do not respect or value anything we have given to those without freedom.
Very beautifully put. I have done just a little writing on why this is not another Vietnam, and mentioned the 2000 marker in passing. I will definitely point friends and family to your empassioned words.
dulce et decorum est.
“…and when our work is done,
our course on Earth is run,
may it be said, ‘Well Done’,
‘Be Thou At Peace’”
Thank you! Beautifully written, saying just exactly what needs to be said.
Lex Does It Again
Lex puts his mastery of the english language to work once again, with the usual provocative effects… This time the subject is that “magic” number of 2000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq.
“… and have seen their sacrifices close at hand, believe in the rightness of what it is that they are doing, the cause for which they gave their lives.”
I want to personally thank you and all the mil bloggers who continually point this out to the folks “three generations away from military service” who get all their info from the MSM.
This morning my 88 year old neighbor, who won’t give up the WaPost and still watches the evening news (antenna on roof) mentioned that Iraq may have been a mistake. I don’t take to lecturing those who have been around as long as her but I asked her to remember what it felt like in 1942-43 when we weren’t sure we were winning. Then I asked her if in 1945 she would ever predict that Germany & Japan would be democratized and our allies. She saw my point because she knows the nature of the enemy (Evil) but the MSM where she gets her info is failing.
B2