When War Becomes This Personal
By NANCY GIBBS
Last week was the deadliest one for U.S. soldiers since this war began. We know this because the headlines told us of the seven Marines who died when their KC-130 Hercules slammed into a mountain in Pakistan. But we know more than this.
We know that Staff Sergeant Scott Germosen's widow Jennifer had bought him a new wedding band, to surprise him when he came home. That Captain Daniel McCollum was a star wrestler in high school, voted "best looking" in his class. That Sergeant Jeannette Winters was the first servicewoman to die in this war. That Lance Corporal Bryan Bertrand had just re-enlisted for another tour because he didn't want to sit on the sidelines at a time like this. Last week Green Beret Nathan Ross Chapman was buried by his family: we met his widow Renae on the Today show, saw the broken-heart necklace that he had given her. And last week Lisa Beamer, widow of Todd, hero of Flight 93, had her baby, Morgan Kay, 7 lbs., 21 in. We saw the first baby pictures.
We know the children's names. We meet the parents, the best man at the wedding, the football coach, in the newspapers and on morning television. Whatever taboo made grief a private matter is for now a casualty of war. Has there ever been so intimate a reckoning as this--and not just on our side? Mohamed Atta was a scrawny kid who liked chess and got upset if someone killed a bug. Osama bin Laden was devoted to his mama and liked to drive tractors and watch nature videos. We compare his pallor from video to video to assess his failing health. This is indeed the devil we know.
When war becomes this personal, does it become harder or easier to fight? Vietnam, the first televised war, inspired as its memorial the granite wall etched with 58,175 names, an antidote to the memory of nameless nightly body counts. Since then the experts have chronicled America's "casualty aversion" through Lebanon, Somalia, Kosovo. The first President Bush was so concerned about maintaining public support during the Gulf War that shots of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base were banned. The Pentagon expected tens of thousands of casualties; 148 died. The blessing of a swift victory was its curse; so few soldiers perished that it left the impression that war had been made safe, childproofed by the high-tech, high-altitude, hands-free campaign. And that this is what it takes to maintain public support.
In his speech on the Sunday the air campaign in Afghanistan began, President Bush read a letter from a fourth-grade girl. "As much as I don't want my dad to fight," she wrote, "I'm willing to give him to you." Americans, he said, were acquiring a new understanding of freedom's cost in duty and sacrifice. He acknowledged that the soldiers he was sending into battle were not just warriors but daddies; and he was sending them to fight a suicidal enemy in a country that was a garden of mines, abuzz with old U.S. Stinger missiles waiting to bring down a helicopter. No one expected them all to come home alive. But hardly anyone said not to send them.
Still the question lingered: How much loss could we stand? CIA officer Johnny Micheal Spann (high school football player, loved Top Gun) had e-mailed his dad before his death, says the Washington Post, asking him to write to lawmakers. "Support your government and your military," he urged, "especially when the bodies start coming home." That was an extraordinary plea from a man heading into harm's way: Don't fail us; don't let us die in vain. Had he heard too often the expert condescension, that Americans only support wars that are quick and easy to win? There is no way to prove who is right until America is more sorely tested: Do we provide every lost soldier an honor guard through every living room only because there are so few of them? Or are there so few because our leaders know we will get to know each one by name and can only bear so much? Pollsters chart a growing acceptance of risk. But mercifully we have not reached the threshold, tested how much we can feel sorrow without feeling despair, and we accept that lives may be lost--so long as they aren't wasted.
It may be that the "lessons" of Vietnam or Lebanon or Somalia do not apply; everything about this task is different. We were attacked. We've already suffered thousands of casualties; we fight to defend ourselves, our principles and their memory. And this too is an intimate crusade. Credit the New York Times and its "Portraits of Grief" with ensuring that even though nearly 3,000 people perished, we may eventually make the acquaintance of each one. We know who was a bride-to-be and who was a woodcarver, who clipped coupons and who had retired the week before and gone in only to clean out his desk. Everyone is a story. Every story needs telling. Osama bin Laden is right when he says that "Americans love life." But he thinks that makes us weak; he misunderstood completely, that this is what makes us strong.