Last Thursday, during halftime of the Men’s basketball game against Oregon, ten individuals—men and women—filed onto the court. Some walked with a limp, some with a cane, all were veterans of the Iraq war. Most of them looked to be in their early 20s. I distinctly remember one of them, a young man with crutches and a missing leg.
I began to applaud, but as I looked around the stadium, many people seemed unaware of what was happening at half-court. In the student section, the people around me were sitting down and shooting the shit, or climbing the stairs toward the restrooms and food vendors. The din of their conversations and the patter of our footsteps smothered the applause.
Hesitantly, I sat back down, uncomfortable with clapping alone. I receded into the crowd. A voice then muttered something incomprehensible over the PA system, and the young man on crutches raised one, waving to the crowd. Amid that quiet roar, the wounded soldiers turned, and then filed out.
I’m worried that I overestimated the veterans’ blithe reception. But, to me, the moment was incontrovertible proof of a distance I sense within my peers and within myself from the war: though it has taken the lives of over 2,900 American soldiers and wounded almost 22,000. The war in Iraq has always seemed a strange war, one whose achievements appear superficial and temporary. The country seems like a stewing pot of sectarian rage and violence. It feels so far away, somehow unreal.
I have always recognized the extraordinary sacrifice we have asked of our volunteer armed forces for the last three and a half years: to put their lives on the line for an indefinite period of time, in a country that we may leave more unstable than we found it. And I know of perhaps two guys from my graduating class, a class of less than 30 kids, who entered the service after high school. I’ve never attempted to make contact with them, partly because I’m afraid of what I’ll find out. We weren’t really close, after all, and we took different paths: I chose to go to college, they chose to enter the service.
Just what that choice meant, however, never came into perspective until last Thursday. My father and I marched against the war, though we come from a military family. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II and my uncle enlisted in the Army during the Vietnam. I nearly entered the Air Force Academy before picking Georgetown.
Perhaps I’d been able to tune out the war because it has been relatively bloodless for us—the 2,900 American dead pale in comparison to the 58,000 in Vietnam, or the 400,000 in World War II. Our society, it seems, can hide 25,000 casualties.
But, somehow the wounded came into my life on Thursday. It’s certainly one thing to read about the wounded and quite another to see them in person, to see how young they look, how fragile. What pained me most was that despite all that those young men and women had forgone for my country and for me, there would always be an endless expanse between us. Somehow, I would always be sitting up in the stands, rows away, just observing them.
My father once told me that he had often felt slight pangs of regret for not fighting in Vietnam. He was the right age, but got deferrals for college and graduate school, and eventually for working in the Uranium industry. His life had gone on as “normal,” while his friends from high school either died or were changed forever, in jungles across the sea. And my father knew that, on a deep level, he would never again be able to relate the men who symbolized his generation. Are we now building another Vietnam generation, one that returns eternally scarred, and that will never be able to fully reinsert itself into our society?
Our elected leaders, meanwhile, debate the semantics of the words “civil war”—whether or not they adequately describe the situation in Iraq. They wait for new reports from experts, hoping one will provide a quick fix. But none comes. We have certainly broken Iraq, and not fixing it would perhaps be the greatest injustice to our troops—to take their sacrifice, and to quash any hope of seeing good come from it.
For now, though, you and I sit here, chatting idly and waiting for a new half to begin, so we can cheer for victory, safely, from the sidelines. And if we lose, you and I will go home for the night, and slip peacefully into bed. Perhaps all we need is something to make the urgency of the situation clear, something to pull us onto the court, so that we demand action from our leaders, from the world, from anyone who will listen. What will it be?
