I hate war so much I'm loath to talk about it. But as one who has walked in the warrior's bootprints, I have to say a word about the men and women most affected by the war drum's beat.
They are the ones from the big cities and small towns you've never heard of, assembling in the far-flung desert outposts awaiting orders from the commander in chief. Theirs is a grim, lonely task. Not all of them are coming back. And the ones who do will be changed in ways they can't imagine. The least we can do, no matter how we feel about the coming battle, is support them.
In a previous existence, I was a draftee who never left the States during the misadventure of Vietnam. And in a later life, I was toiling as a journalist for The Associated Press when I was tapped to be a war correspondent during Desert Storm, attached to the 82nd Airborne Division and armed only with a portable Olivetti typewriter as a member of Combat Pool No. 1.
Get down in the dirt with the paratroopers and you get a worm's eye view of this grim business, because there is no spin at the foxhole level.
You'd think we'd have a grasp on this by now, given that Socrates wrote a long time ago that only the dead know the end of war. Poets and philosophers through the ages have broached the subject. Ernest Hemingway got to the nub of it: "Never think that war, no matter how necessary or how justified, is not a crime."
Myself, I think back to the words of an Apache helicopter pilot on the eve of the Gulf war. "GIs want war least of all," he said, "because we're the ones who have to fight and die in it. But I'd rather do this now than have my son come back and have to take care of it."
The irony of the second half of his statement can't be ignored. The ones making the case for taking out a ruthless madman are the same ones who allowed him to stay in power 12 years ago. But there is always another war left to fight.
The first world conflict was called the war to end all wars, but it just created the conditions for the second war with Germany, not to mention Japan and Italy. World War II was fought to save the world for democracy, and it led to a long, tense, expensive Cold War with communism. And five years after the mushroom clouds evaporated cities, there was a war with North Korea, which never really ended and could go ballistic again at any moment. And then came Vietnam, when opinions against the war tarred those who were called to fight it because nobody separated the war from the warriors.
On a personal level, a war starts the moment you leave home.
Keep in mind where the trouble is brewing. The Arabian desert, part of the eye-for-an-eye Middle East, is one of the most forbidding environments on the planet, a tortured landscape that grudgingly supports scorpions, sand fleas, flies as big as Chinook helicopters and the odd nomadic camel herder.
Rommel, the German field marshal in World War II, once said about North Africa: First, you must defeat the desert. And an Airborne officer added this footnote about Iraq: The desert is an ass-kicker. Desert Storm troops squinted out into the sere sea of sand, which was more lifeless than a graveyard, and dubbed it the world's biggest ashtray or the world's biggest box of kitty litter.
Deprivations were endured with the support from home. A letter, even the "To Any Soldier" mail, was like oxygen. It doesn't take long to write one.
Much of today's chatter, most of which comes from those who don't know a battalion from a brigade, focuses on air power and high-tech gadgetry that can kill, maim, castrate, incinerate with sickening precision. Still, there is something Old Testament about war in the desert. There should be no mystery why three of the great religions of the world evolved from the general region. Sit out in that desert long enough and you'll hear voices and see visions.
Not only is there an adversary out there with guns and heinous weapons, the wise warriors will mark their vehicles and display orange panels to keep from getting hit by their own forces. "Friendly fire" isn't friendly. And every supply train following the combat troops carries an inventory of body bags.
Before crossing the line into battle, which is like going through a doorway to a different world, the warriors engage in rituals that don't get mentioned at Pentagon briefings or show up on TV. One such ritual is to lighten the load, getting rid of everything that isn't absolutely essential for war, except for one thing. You take along one talisman -- a picture of your sweetheart, a lock of hair from your child, a prayer book, a Bart Simpson doll that was a present from your kids -- to see you through in the darkest hours.
There comes a time when you write your last letter home. It might be to your ex-spouse to say there are still feelings even if things didn't work out. Or it might be to your mother, thanking her for raising you -- just in case.
My own epiphany came that first night after invading Iraq, which happened to be on a Saturday. For shelter, you dig a hole in the ground and stack all the sand along the north berm. It gets you out of the wind, and if an artillery shell lands nearby, it might absorb a piece of shrapnel. If you take a direct hit, you have no chance. But in the efficiency of the battlefield, all anybody has to do is shovel the dirt back on top of you because you've dug your own grave.
The orders were simple that night: "No lights tonight, and no talking. But if you have to, you can whimper softly to yourself."
While you lie there making peace with yourself, you look up at the firmament and muse that in all the time of human evolution that war still exists as a way to settle disputes. And you promise yourself that if you survive, you'll make the future days count for something.
I asked a sergeant how he prepared for battle. He opened his Bible to the 91st Psalm, having committed his fate to a higher power.
Put yourself in his shoes and read it. And send along the spirit of it to those in the gathering storm.
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