“At the time, I would see little girls on the side of the road, and I felt like I was part of a big machine that was going to help them have a better life. At the time.”
“After that, now I think, well, now I’m damned. Now I’ve done the worst thing.”
~
This year, thousands of Americans missed Thanksgiving with their families, and were not home for Christmas. Many won’t be home ever again. The war in Iraq is, for the foreseeable future, the most controversial topic in the lives of many Generation Y’ers, and the rest of the world, as well. So many of us stand vehemently against what our own country is doing there, and yet there are staggeringly large numbers of our generation fighting as we forget them in our righteous indignation. In truth, it is these members of the Millenial Generation, the ones risking their lives for their country when no one is even sure it’s the right thing, and when more than half the country is against everything they are doing there, that stand as the best examples of the dedication and stubborn determination to make a difference that has begun to characterize the younger generation’s impact on our world. So, finally, my first “real” posting is for the young soldiers in
According to a report released from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Personnel, and Readiness, 49% of the troops on active duty in the US enlisted military forces were between the ages of 17-24. Imagine how this number has increased in the past five years as more Gen Y’ers have come of age to enlist and decided to sign up to fight.
According to the Brookings Institution Iraq Index released on October 29, 2007, the total troops having gone to Iraq are more than 28,000. 3,839 of those, as of the end of October, will never come home. 2,967 of those were between the ages of 17 and 30 when they were killed. That is 77% of the total casualties.
So many of us in Generation Y oppose the war; there are so many opportunities for us right now here in America to do exciting things and make a difference. What motivates those who sign up to fight a war that has no end in sight and such a scary chance of injury or death? I asked myself this question when my younger stepbrother decided to forego college and signed up for the Marines right after high school graduation. He comes from a military family, so it was not a surprise, but I tried my best to convince him that college was a better choice, and then afterwards he could enter the military as an officer. I couldn’t understand when he never wavered in his decision.
When I attended his graduation from boot camp down in South Carolina, I began to understand a little better what was driving him. The sense of purpose in everything those young men did was palpable. Even marching down the street and standing in formation took on special significance because of the reasons they were going through it. It showed me a different meaning of the word “duty,” one that does not focus on the personal connection, as I had always understood it and mentioned in my last post, but “duty” as in doing your part, being a part of something larger. For many of those Marines, it’s not necessarily about fighting terror- it’s tough for anyone to understand how what is happening in Iraq is really making a difference against terrorism. But for a 20-year-old Marine, perhaps it’s more about fighting to make a difference, to protect Americans’ right to make a difference, even if that means disagreeing with the very thing that the Marine is giving his life for. When this country is perfect, no one will have to die in the midst of a power struggle masked as a philosophically and morally justified destruction of a society such as this one. Until then:
“People would pop shots at us and pop back. They'd have a setup where they have a bomb in the road, and everybody sits by the windows when they set off an IED. When we're looking at what's going on, everybody's laughing and pointing and smiling after your buddy's sitting there bleeding.”
“I have PTSD. I know when I got it -- the night I killed an 8-year-old girl. Her family was trying to cross a checkpoint. We'd just shot three guys who'd tried to run a checkpoint. And during that mess, they were just trying to get through to get away from it all. And we ended up shooting all them, too. It was a family of six. The only one that survived was a 13-month-old and her mother. And the worst part about it all was that where I shot my bullets, when I went to see what I'd shot at, there was an 8-year-old girl there. I tried my best to bring her back to life, but there was no use.”
~
There is no way we can feel good about this. If you disagree with the war, nothing will ever redeem it in your eyes, especially after hearing stories like these. It’s a war- it’s unlike any other cause. It’s ugly and destructive and sad and confusing. But be careful not to simply label it “war” as if that does justice to the nameless, faceless mass of gun-wielding fatigues that is so often our only vision of a vastly different reality. When those faces begin to fill in, as they did for me when my stepbrother became one of them, “war” no longer seems a satisfactory way to describe a maelstrom of physical, emotional, ideological, domestic, and international conflicts. “War” is suddenly too simple, and we’re left with tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, trying to describe what we don’t understand. And all we can see really clearly, if we keep our eyes and minds open and if we’re lucky, is that these tens of thousands of young people believe in something so much that they are willing to give their lives for it. Whether we agree with the war itself or not, we must recognize these soldiers, these young adults, as an example of this generation’s maturity, depth of emotion, and sheer courage. Let’s hope that most of these amazing men and women come back to lead Generation Y as we gradually take over here at home.
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