he wrote. “I shall be looking over you. And you will hear me from time to time on the gentle breeze that sounds at night, and in the rustle of leaves.”
Bob Herbert highlights this final goodbye from Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, a soldier fallen in Iraq, to his wife, the mother of his newborn child, in his stinging rebuke of the criminals responsible for the senseless slaughter ongoing in Iraq:
Much of the nation is mourning the more than 2,000 American G.I.’s lost to the war in Iraq. But some of the mindless Washington weasels who sent those brave and healthy warriors to their unnecessary doom have other things on their minds. They’re scrambling about the capital, huddling frantically with lawyers, hoping that their habits of deception, which are a way of life with them, don’t finally land them in a federal penitentiary.
See them sweat. The most powerful of the powerful, the men who gave the president his talking points and his marching orders, are suddenly sending out distress signals: Don’t let them send me to prison on a technicality.
This is not, however, about technicalities. You can spin it any way you want, but Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is ultimately about the monumentally conceived and relentlessly disseminated deceit that gave us the war that never should have happened.
He excerpted Sgt. Jones’ words from James Dao’s 2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark, a hard read, but it is important that we pay witness to the price being paid by these soldiers, these families.
Every state in the country was represented on the roster of the dead, as were Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, Guam, Micronesia, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa. California and Texas had the most deaths, as they did for the first 1,000, followed by New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. At least 17 of the last 1,000 dead were women.
For Iraqis, too, the death toll seems to have accelerated. Estimates for Iraqis are not precise and are subject to much controversy. But according to figures compiled by the allied military forces in Iraq and analyzed by Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a nonprofit research group, Iraqis have suffered on average more than 50 casualties a day in 2005, including wounded and dead, compared with fewer than 40 a day in 2004.
Attention must be paid.
It seems we need these ritualized notices of big round numbers, of anniversaries and milestones and markers. It helps us to wrap emotional and intellectual ribbons around the chaotic, the painful, the joyous and important events in our lives. It helps us to understand an often incomprehensible world.
The Pentagon, of course, doesn’t see it that way:
On Tuesday, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a military spokesman in Iraq, wrote in an e-mail to reporters, “The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives.”
But on Wednesday, the Times ran a front-page story marking the 2,000th fatality — plus four pages of photos of the dead inside. The gallery covered every death since the paper last performed this service, at the 1,000 mark in early September 2004.
There was once a time when the sacrifices paid in our names were on public record. The Pentagon, apparently, thinks that they must happen in secret, that they are of import only to the direct family of the dead. What kind of society cares not for the names of the foot soldier, the sergent, the officer?
Eric Alterman publishes the letters from Major Bob Bateman on his blog regularly, and I think the one up today highlights what is wrong with the civilians prosecuting this war. He describes in his letter the tradition of the salute, that to soldier’s and officers it is a sign of professional respect, one honorable professional to another:
Ahead of me, sitting on a bench, resting from the weight of his battle-rattle, was a soldier.
The gravel crunched under my feet. Ten yards away a soldier tilted his head slightly, catching a surreptitious glance. My pace was neither fast nor slow, but was closer to the normal ground-eating amble I adopt when carrying a load. Seven yards. Five yards.
The sergeant comes to his feet. It is not a springing motion but a smooth fluid one. In the same liquid manner his right arm shoots upward, coming to a rigid position at a 90-degree angle from his body while the forearm moves higher. His right hand snaps intro position, knife-edge towards me with the palm turned slightly inward. He is rendering the “hand salute.” It is crisp. Clean. Professional.
Conditioned at a near-Pavlovian level, my own arm executes the same ballet. Three yards.
“Afternoon sir.”
“Afternoon sergeant.”
My hand snaps down. A tenth of a second later the sergeant’s does as well. Almost as quickly he drops back to his seat and is again utterly relaxed.
He goes on to explain that this is a tradition, NOT a regulation:
Many people who have never served do not understand what the salute is to us. Outsiders, it seems, often see it as a quaint tradition at best. Less generously, some consider the hand salute as indicative of our hidebound nature, or a hold-over from older, darker days, marking one man as inferior and one man as superior. Perhaps one day, long past, it was this. But that is no longer the case, and has not been for a long time. Not among Professionals.
Between us it is a greeting. A mutual acknowledgement. It starts, by tradition but not regulation, with the lower ranking man. The higher ranked soldier returns the salute, and drops the salute, then the initiator drops his. That is the process. But the meaning is hidden.
For us it is recognition. One pro to another, and that is all. Thus, if an enlisted man, or a lower ranking officer approaches me, and his hands are full, I will salute him. Not to do so would be disrespectful of his service, just as his not initiating a salute (assuming he saw me, and had empty hands) would be disrespectful of mine. Who salutes first matters a lot less. Again, that is why it is a tradition, but not a regulation.
He goes further to relate how the Iraqi military has not developed this tradition. Soldiering isn’t looked at as something professional, a relationship demanding respect both up and down the chain of command in order for it to work:
This, friends, is why it is taking so goddamned long to teach the Iraqi Army. No, we’re not trying to make them just like us. But we are trying to give them the tools of the professional. In the Iraqi Army under Saddam, indeed in all other Middle Eastern armies extant, the officers do consider the enlisted men a sub-class. They treat them as chattel. They act as though they are entitled. And in all of this they show that they just don’t get it. Those attitudes did not work 1,000 years ago, and they do not work today. That is what we are trying to pass on here; The idea that your men matter. Ultimately your men matter more than you do, and no matter what, you must respect them. It all comes down to one simple rule we have in the American Army.
It is an inviolate rule, especially in the infantry where things can occasionally run short. This is a rule which says as much about us as does the salute, but which nobody outside the Army sees. In one line, this is a rule which exemplifies what we are trying, hard, to pass on here. A rule which if we can pass it on, and make them understand and believe, will make them capable.
Officers Eat Last.
If this is how officers are supposed to support their troops, how then about the man the military’s officers answer to, the civilian Commander in Chief? Does he not offer them a duty of care. Should he not eat last?
This, I think, is a clue to why the prosecution of this unnecessary war has been so criminal. This:
They treat them as chattel.
This, I think, sums up neatly the attitude displayed by the “leaders” of our government, especially the Commander in Chief, in the legislature and the executive, on Capitol Hill and in the White House. After all, why pay notice to the passing of chattel? All of the pretty words spewed at photo ops and in press releases are just window dressing, purfume to cover the stench from the abattoir.
This is why we aren’t to show, aren’t to count, aren’t to notice, aren’t to honor the actual dead in anything more than the abstract. They are chattel in a society increasingly built on making more and more people chattel. Chattel and owners. Carcasses and butchers.
Attention must be paid.
