WALKING WOUNDED
OLD SOLDIERS DONąT FADE AWAY

WALKING WOUNDED
OLD SOLDIERS DON=B9T FADE AWAY
By Fred Reed
The American Conservative
January 31, 2005 issue

http://amconmag.com/2005_01_31/article1.html

The observant will have noticed that we hear little from the troops

Iraq
and see almost nothing of the wounded. Why, one might wonder, does

CNN
put an enlisted Marine before a camera and, for 15 minutes without
editing,
let him say what he thinks? Is he not an adult and a citizen? Is he

engaged in important events on our behalf?

Sound political reasons exist. Soldiers are a risk PR-wise, the

a
liability. No one can tell what they might say, and conspicuous
dismemberment is bad for recruiting. An enlisted man in front of a
camera is
dangerous. He could wreck the governmental spin apparatus in five
minutes.
It is better to keep soldiers discreetly out of sight.

So we do not see much of the casualties, ours or theirs. Yet they are
there,
somewhere, with missing legs, blind, becoming accustomed to groping

things in their new darkness, learning to use the wheelchairs that

be
theirs for 50 years. Some face worse fates than others. Quadriplegics
will
be warehoused in VA hospitals where nurses will turn them at

like
hamburgers, to prevent bedsores. Friends and relatives will soon

them. Suicide will be a frequent thought. The less damaged will get
around.

For a brief moment perhaps the casualties will believe, then try
desperately
to keep believing, that they did something brave and worthy and
terribly
important for that abstraction, country. Some will expect thanks. But
there
will be no thanks, or few, and those quickly forgotten. It will be
worse.
People will ask how they lost the leg. In Iraq, they will say, hoping
for
sympathy, or respect, or understanding. The response, often unvoiced
but
unmistakable, will be, "What did you do that for?" The wounded will
realize
that they are not only crippled, but freaks.

The years will go by. Iraq will fade into the mist. Wars always do. A
generation will rise for whom it will be just history. The

veterans will find first that almost nobody appreciates what they

then
that few even remember it. If -- when, many would say -- the United
States
is driven out of Iraq, the soldiers will look back and realize that

whole affair was a fraud. Wars are just wars. They seem important at
the
time. At any rate, we are told that they are important.

Yet the wounds will remain. Arms do not grow back. For the paralyzed
there
will never be girlfriends, dancing, rolling in the grass with

The
blind will adapt as best they can. Those with merely a missing leg

count themselves lucky. They will hobble about, managing to lead
semi-normal
lives, and people will say, "How well he handles it." An admirable
freak.
For others it will be less good. A colostomy bag is a sorry companion
on a
wedding night.

These men will come to hate. It will not be the Iraqis they hate.

we do
not talk about.

It is hard to admit that one has been used. Some of the crippled will
forever insist that the war was needed, that they were protecting

sisters from an Islamic invasion, or Vietnamese, or Chinese. Others
will
keep quiet and drink too much. Still others will read, grow older and
wiser
-- and bitter. They will remember that their vice president, a man
named
Cheney, said that during his war, the one in Asia, he "had other
priorities." The veterans will remember this when everyone else has
long
since forgotten Cheney.

I once watched the first meeting between a young Marine from the

blind, much of his face shot away, and his high-school sweetheart,

had
come from Tennessee to Bethesda Naval Hospital to see him.

Hatred comes easily. There are wounds and there are wounds. A friend

mine
spent two tours in Asia in that war now little remembered. He killed
many
people, not all of them soldiers. It is what happens in wars. The
memory
haunts him. Jack is a hard man from a tough neighborhood, quick with
his
fists, intelligent but uneducated -- not a liberal flower vain over

sensitivity. He lives in Mexican bars few would enter and has no
politics
beyond an anger toward government. He was not a joyous killer. He
remembers
what he did, knows now that he was had. It gnaws at him. One is wise

stay
away from him when he is drinking.

People say that this war isn't like Vietnam. They are correct.
Washington
fights its war in Iraq with no better understanding of Iraq than it

of
Vietnam, but with much better understanding of the United States. The
Pentagon learned from Asia. This time around it has controlled the
press
well. Here is the great lesson of Southeast Asia: the press is
dangerous,
not because it is inaccurate, which it often is, but because it often
isn't.
So we don't much see the caskets -- for reasons of privacy, you
understand.

The war in Iraq is fought by volunteers, which means people that no

in
power cares about. No one in the mysteriously named "elite" gives a
damn
about some kid from a town in Tennessee that has one gas station and

beer
hall with a stuffed buck's head. Such a kid is a redneck at best,
pretty
much from another planet, and certainly not someone you would let

daughter date. If conscription came back, and college students with
rich
parents learned to live in fear of The Envelope, riots would blossom

before. Now Yale can rest easy. Thank God for throwaway people.

The nearly perfect separation between the military and the rest of

country, or at least the influential in the country, is wonderful for
the
war effort. It prevents concern. How many people with a college

even
know a soldier? Yes, some, and I will get e-mail from them, but they
are a
minority. How many Americans have been on a military base? Or, to be
truly
absurd, how many men in combat arms went to, say, Harvard? Ah, but

have
other priorities.

In 15 years in Washington, I knew many, many reporters and
intellectuals and
educated people. Almost none had worn boots. So it is. Those who

do
not have to go, and do not know anyone who has gone, and don't

themselves. There is a price for this, though not one Washington

about. Across America, in places where you might not expect it -- in
Legion
halls and VFW posts, among those who carry membership cards from the
Disabled American Veterans -- there are men who hate. They don't hate
America. They hate those who sent them. Talk to the wounded from Iraq
in
five years.