Not long ago, I was speaking with a conservative Republican congressional staffer who told me all her friends from high school now serving in Iraq were becoming more and more vehement in their opposition to the war.  I explained to her that two close friends of mine (both military wives) remain vehemently loyal to President Bush and to the war effort.

"Are their husbands in Iraq?" she asked.  "No" was my answer.  "That's the difference," she explained.
--"Military Support for GOP Is In Freefall," U.S. News & World Report," Bonnie Erbe, March 14, 2007

"A lot of the counter-demonstrators are veterans--of Vietnam and other wars.  They're always ready to have this fight, anytime.  But then, a lot of peace marchers are veterans, too, filling the front rank of the protest column from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon.  "Boo!  Boo!" shriek the sideline veterans at the marching veterans.  "Traitors!"

Bands of brothers in Baghdad, broken apart at home.  The veterans for peace, including active-duty men and women, and guys fresh from Iraq in desert camo, one of whom is sobbing, don't seem prepared for the veteran-on-veteran trash talk.  The marching vets look so much younger and more vulnerable than the ones on the side waving flags.  They still have the thousand-yard stare, and a battlefield hauntedness.  "Bring our brothers home," they say.
--"Theater of Battle With a Familiar Script," David Montgomery, Washington Post, March 18, 2007

March 18, 2003
Barbara Bush tells Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning, America" that she will not watch televised coverage of the war.  "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose?  Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant.  So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
--"The Ides of March 2003," Frank Rich, New York Times, March 18, 2007


I'm all jumbled up today.

I've got this stack of research material, things I was intending to post about in Blue Inkblots.  A cantilevered stack, organized according to topic, neatly labeled and paper-clipped, the news articles printed up, underlined, starred for quoting.  All ready to go for nice, concise commentary on events of the day.

But then I read the day's papers, and am reminded that it is the fourth anniversary since Bush made his big war announcement on TV.  After his speech, NBC couldn't wait to break away and get back to "Fear Factor."

The anniversary has been marked by a big war protest that took place in cities all over the world, but the most noticeable one was in Washington, D.C., where the protesters planned to march on the Pentagon as protesters did 40 years ago in outrage over Vietnam, a war which then raged on for six more years and 30,000 more lives lost.

There was also a "counter-protest," from a group calling themselves "The Gathering of Eagles," spurred on by scurrilous rumors among conservatives that the peace marchers were going to deface the Vietnam memorial, so scores of biker-vets showed up and surrounded the Wall to "protect" it from people who would never, EVER have done such a thing in the first place.

In fact, reporters from several newspapers, mixing with the crowd, came upon many veterans who were marching for peace, some of whom had traveled from all across the country, who had never had the opportunity to visit the Wall, and now, they found that they couldn't, because of the scowling, shouting "protectors" surrounding it.

Several middle-aged women, carrying placards and walking with their children, attempted to breach the line so they could visit the Wall.  They were attacked by the counter-protesters, their signs shredded, and obscenities were shouted at them in front of their children.

So who...exactly...really "defaced" the wall?

I've been there, to the Wall.  It is a sacred place.

You walk down a gentle slope of grass from the Lincoln Memorial, and at first, you hardly notice the smooth black surface, listing names, as it begins to rise up beside you, but as you walk, the surface begins to slant upwards...and upwards...more and more names, until, at its apex, you stand surrounded by more than 58,000 names of the dead.

I started to sob and I could not stop, because, to me, they weren't names.  They were BOYS.  Boys who'd kissed me good-night at my front door, boys for whom I had made up care packages with home-baked chocolate-chip cookies and Tabasco sauce and Playboy magazines...boys who'd written me letters with the word "free" scrawled in the upper right-hand corner of the envelopes, boys who disappeared from my life, boys whose names now grace the wall.

As Marine Corps Iraq vet and war opponent Charlie Anderson wrote eloquently in "The Wall That Now Divides Us":

"Yet there is no politics around the wall; we mourn in silence or share our grief aloud not as liberals or conservatives, not as hawks or doves, not as Republicancs or Democrats, but as human beings united by our suffering...

"I took an oath to defend the Constitution and honorably served ten years in uniform.  I still hold my oath no less sacred than the "eagles" claim to.  One of the ways to honor that oath is to speak freely and from the heart.  I sacrificed everything I had and everything I was when I went to Iraq.  I lost my  marriage, a job I loved, and the very way I viewed the world.  It is a shame these "eagles" who claim to love and support me so much not only want to silence my voice, but they have chosen to put a wall between me and the one place in America where I can truly let my guard down and grieve.

It's been four years now, and you think it would be easier, somehow.

In that four years, I have sent my Marine son into combat twice, my Marine nephew three times, and very soon, yet another nephew, who will be deploying to Baghdad with the Army.  (My other nephew, his twin, who is Special Forces, has deployed all over the world in various hotspots; we'll leave it at that.) Their dad, my brother-in-law, deployed to Afghanistan when he got his star, to negotiate with warlords as he had done in the Balkans in the 90's.  He recently retired.

My dad, my brother, my husband, and his other brother are all Vietnam vets.

I keep sending loved ones off to war and it never gets any easier.

With my son and my nephews, especially, I see what war does to them.  I see it in their eyes.  I see it in the eyes of their mothers and their wives or girlfriends.

How do you explain what living with death does to a person?  How do you explain how their faces change in family photographs?  It's in the eyes.  It's a hard wariness, a squint, as if they've been staring into the sun.

I've got a framed photo of my son and his lovely girlfriend.  It was taken after he'd returned from his second deployment and was spending some time with her.  It's a close-up, outside--he'd probably held the camera in his hand and snapped it.  She's leaning her face into his.

In that moment, his eyes look a hundred years old, (though he was 28 at the time) and the lines fanning out from their corners don't normally appear on a man until he's in his 40's.  He's relaxed because she is there, but his eyes...they are dark.  It's the only way I can describe it.

Haunted.

Her face is sweet and happy and unlined, as if she's 20 years younger, though she isn't.  Her blonde hair glows, her smile lights up her face, and it just looks like sunshine next to a cloud.  I don't know how else to describe it, but I do love the photograph, because to me, it just validates how important this young woman is in that young man's life.  She will bring the light back in.  She will make him smile again.  Several months later, at Christmas, I could see the truth of it.

Four years ago, I got into a shouting match with one of my sisters-in-law at a restaurant.  This sister-in-law doesn't have any children.  Her husband, one of my husband's brothers, did two tours in Vietnam with the Special Forces, and four years ago, she was all a-twitter about Bush's Big Landing on the Aircraft Carrier in his pilot costume.  You know, Mission Accomplished.

I remember hollering at her about "THIS BOGUS WAR"--and then stopping, looking around at the people staring at us, feeling slightly horrified.  After all, we'd gathered--the whole family--to celebrate my daughter's college graduation.  They'd driven three hours to be there for the ceremony and here I was yelling at them in public.

It's been four years now and it does not help to know that I was right.  It does not help to know that SHE knows I was right.  Nothing helps.  As one retired general put it--the righter he gets, the worse he feels.

It's been four years and I've sent so many dear sweet boys, and sons and nephews, and sons of friends, into battle...and I can't bear it anymore.

The rage...I thought the anger I felt over this whole wasted enterprise would somehow get better--especially since my Marine nephew just recently got out of the Marines after his third tour and enrolled in college, and my son is due to get out this summer.

But now my other nephew is leaving early, without desert training, so that they can meet those "surge" demands.  I'm hearing horror stories about Marine units nowhere near ready to go, with virtually NO combat training, but put on the fast-track because, as my son puts it, "When the president asks for more troops, more troops is what he gets."

George W. Bush and his neocon warmongering buddies have plunged this nation back 40 years, back into a time of rage and hatred and angry shouts across great divides, of boys trudging off to an unwinnable war and coming back dark and old in their eyes--if they come back at all.  Of families torn apart, of the silent anguish of post-traumatic stress, of veterans bleeding wounds no one can see, of mothers and wives and girlfriends (and fathers and husbands and boyfriends) standing by, watching helplessly as their loved ones suffer.

You don't know what to say.  You don't know what to do.  You just love them.  As I told my son, "I can't say that I understand what you are going through, because I haven't been through it.  But I know YOU.  And I know you will be all right."

This is what we hope.

Those people in Washington, D.C. who claimed to "support the troops" took one place where veterans of any war can feel at home, can feel a sense of the sacred, of honor and of courage and of terrible, terrible sacrifice, and of quiet pride and solemn sorrow------they took that, and they profaned it by screaming insults at the very people they claimed to "support."

WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING IN THIS COUNTRY?

It's been four years, and this war rages on, and my family continues to sacrifice, and I think of my sons and my nephews and all the other children of war, and I can't hardly breathe from the weight in my chest.  (It got so bad, at one point during one of Dustin's deployments, that I went to see a cardiologist.  He said my heart was fine.  But it's not.  It's broken, you see.)

It's been four years, and people care more who wins "American Idol" than who wins as President of the United States.  As the president's mother put it, Why should we waste our beautiful minds?  It's not relevant.

This war is not really "relevant" to anyone but the less than one percent who are actually fighting it, and their families.  People tell pollsters they want the war to end but what they really care about is the big sale at the mall.

It's been four years and more than a million troops have rotated in and out and in and out of this unwinnable war, 3217, as of today, have died, more than 200,000 have been treated at veteran's hospitals, and the politicians pontificate about who is more patriotic.

It's been four years, and soon I'll be praying for yet another famiy member, sending funny cards and care packages and praying for him daily, and calling his mom from time to time, hoping against hope that the Mills family can somehow yet again survive war, hoping that if and when he comes home, I'll still be able to recognize his smile.

It's been four years.  People shout and people preach, but we in military families just keep fighting.

And it doesn't get any easier.