"People, not chess pieces"

[babylonsister]

The author of a new book about the West Point class of 2002 looks into what kind of support our troops really want from us, and why so many of us have become accustomed to sacrificing so little

by Bill Murphy Jr.
"People, not chess pieces"


Compared to the forever-etched-in-our-minds date of 9/11, October 7 passes with barely a whisper. But the war we’ve been involved in for seven years wasn’t truly a war until America struck back, and it wasn’t until October 7, 2001, when American planes dropped bombs on Afghanistan, that the U.S. military took the first steps in the long march of war.

We were a coiled spring of a country back then. A cartoon making the rounds portrayed a firefighter in the wreckage of the World Trade Center handing an American flag to a U.S. Army soldier. “I’ll take it from here,” the soldiers says. In Los Angeles, where I lived at the time, it seemed American flags suddenly appeared everywhere, flapping from the rear windows of giant SUVs on the Santa Monica Freeway. The nation that President George W. Bush addressed on Oct. 7, 2001 as the bombs started falling was one whose initial shock had begun to give way to anger and resolve.

Bush quoted a letter from a fourth-grader, the daughter of a soldier : “‘As much as I don't want my Dad to fight,’” Bush read, “‘I'm willing to give him to you.’

“This is a precious gift,” the president continued. “The greatest she could give. … Since September 11, an entire generation of young Americans has gained new understanding of the value of freedom, and its cost in duty and in sacrifice.”

Bush may as well have been president of a completely different country then. Seven years on, that girl would now be the age of the newest privates in today’s army. She and her peers are beginning their young adulthood in a country for which hundreds of thousands of soldiers are fighting abroad. And despite all the talk back in 2001 about duty and sacrifice, only a small subset of Americans have been asked to give much at all. Last April, the New York Times estimated that 1.3 million Americans had served in Iraq; factor in another six months and account for Afghanistan, and perhaps one-and-a-half million men and women have served in our wars since 2001. But this is a country of 300 million, which means that the burden has fallen squarely on the shoulders of the few.

I’ve found myself wondering lately how it happened that our national impulse in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to serve and sacrifice was so thoroughly thwarted, and what, if anything, we can, or should, do about it. To some extent, we civilians have simply done what our leaders asked us to do – which is nothing at all. I think back to my first Army Reserve drill the weekend after 9/11, as my fellow weekend warriors’ hands eagerly shot up in formation like kindergarteners every time our colonel asked for volunteers—to do what, exactly? Put your name on a list. Be ready. Wait.

more...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810u/how-to-support-our-troops

[Cronopio]

1. "People, not chess pieces" - my kind of philosophy. nt

[babylonsister]

2. Yes, mine also. nt