Yesterday I stood upon the flight deck of the USS Intrepid (CVS-11). The carrier is a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and the people of New York have turned it into a museum, along with the experimental submarine Sturgeon. They have a static display of aircraft on the Intrepid's deck, including an A-12 Blackbird ( a sister to the famed SR-71), and a MiG-21. As I walked to the bows I could see a group of man gathered together ahead of me. They were all clad in sweats but listening to a very clean cut man in a beard, who seemed like a politician to me. At the end of his talk they cheered.
I noticed that one of them had an artificial leg. I looked again and noticed another. Then a man with two artificial legs. Another with a fresh 18" scar down his calf. Artificial hands. Hooks. A man in a wheelchair, a double amputee above the knee. They were all young and fit, and every single one of them bore the scars of war.
I do not know the death toll of Americans in Iraq. It's somewhere around 3,000 but the exact figure really doesn't matter. Most of our knowledge comes from TV. We watched our smart bombs obliterate Iraqi army positions. We hear the stories of suicide bombers and IEDs. We understand intellectually that people die and are mutilated in war, but that doesn't come to most of us. Even the images of flag draped coffins has been suppressed, lest our appetite for the present conflict diminish.
Here before my eyes stood another toll of the war, a cost rarely mentioned in the news statistics. A toll of men whose lives have been changed forever by war, who quite literally left part of themselves on the battlefield.
William Tecumseh Sherman said, "War is hell, which is a good thing lest we grow to fond of it." Any real student of military history soon learns that bonds forged in combat endure the long years of separation. . Why men walk fields and towns where bullets once crackled overhead, remembering the good when there was so much bad.
These men were hurt, and some will never walk again. But at least for that moment they were smiling and happy, their wounds forgotten with the joy of camaraderie. But to me the price also came home. I salute their bravery and patriotism, and I am glad America has such men.
I only wish their civilian leadership was worthy of them. I only wish their President possessed enough humanity to lose sleep over what he has done.
Update.
Boris went to sleep around three P.M yesterday in the lap of my friend Chris, He was glad to see her, and I wish I could have been there at his end. Strangely enough, sometimes it feels like he's there perched on my shoulder, like always.