Let’s all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war achance. This is Afghanistan we’re talking about. Check the map.It’s far away. — Thomas Friedman, New York TimesBut what if tomorrow, turning the corner, it’s not that streetwith those elegant two-story homes & luxurious lawns,but a gutted-out havoc of empty door frames & ruinsof what once had been walls. Overhead, the shrieksof B-52s diving back thru the clouds. A smothering hazethrough which you see women in burkhas down on their kneesdigging their dead from under the rubble. Two blocksfrom home & it’s suddenly Kandahar, the Kapisa Valley,Mazar-i-Sharif. That wreaking of vengeanceyou were so pleased to watch on TV.But it’s you now who cannot stop coughing, whose mouthhas dropped open in terror, whose eyes smartin that acrid smoke; you who are scurrying, shuddering,hugging the shadows. Till you manage, somehow, at last,to find your way home: that snug little duplexwith its nifty flag decal stuck on the window over the door.Still shaking, you manage to get the key in the lock& stumble into your favorite chair, though it’s hours beforeyour heart stops pounding inside your chest& you’re able to breathe, till you no longer retch overthe toilet, till you’ve got yourself calm & all but convincedit must have been some sort of vertigo, seizure, deliriousdream. But now — thank the Good Lord — you’ve cometo your senses at last & are more or less clear whoyou are, where you live, what it is you’re supposed to believe.
Memorial Day
Because our sons adore their plastic missile launchers,cybertronic space bazookas, neutron death-ray guns,a decade down the pike it won’t prove difficultto trick them out in combat boots& camouflage fatigues,rouse them with a frenzy of parades, the headyrhetoric of country, camaraderie & God —the drum & bugle & the sudden thunderof the cannon as they marchinto Hell singing.Which is the order of things.Obedient to a fault, the people will do as they are told.However dispirited by grief at the gravesof their fallen, the mother returns at last to her loom,the father to his lathe,& the inconsolable widow home to raise sonsardent for the next imperial bloodbath:Ilium. Thermopylae. Verdun. Pork Chop Hill.
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