Sadness is a funny
thing. Like the taste of a perfectly
ripe orange, the sadness you felt at some given point in your past can’t be
conjured up again. Your sadness always
seems a little absurd in retrospect. You
know the orange was good, that it was pungent and sweet and sour all at the
same time, and you know that you wept while standing at the graveside of your
grandfather, but just now you can’t remember exactly what it was like.
That’s
something of what it was like to say goodbye to my wife and daughters as I
boarded a bus bound for the place where I would board a plane to take me to Iraq . It was sad and would have been
gut-wrenchingly so if not for the crowd of adult men and women with me going
through the same thing. Also my wife and
I were prepared for it: we’d developed the emotional detachment such a
situation requires. But it was sad. I didn’t look back through the window
longingly the way they do in some movies.
I sat there with my eyes inside the bus they way they do in other
movies, the ones where the audience chokes up and thinks, Why doesn’t he just
look back?
Now,
of course, the sincerity of the moment is lost to the vacuum of memory and the
sadness of it sounds absurd, or at least overblown. I’ve read of many young men now dead at the
hands of our war, and of young men whose minds won’t work quite right after fighting
in our war, and of men whose legs were engineered in a lab to be just like real
legs for use after our war, and sadness is just changing. I imagine the sadness of a mother or young
wife as they watch the flag shift over the convex lid of their son’s or
husband’s coffin. Now picture me on that
bus again looking forward with stalwart resolve. How sad am I really? I don’t remember.
War
is not as dangerous as it used to be either.
I’m saying this from in front of a laptop computer, from inside a
sandbagged concrete building, which is inside a fenced and watchtowered
base. So for me it’s not dangerous. There was one morning when I awoke to the
alarmingly close explosion of a mortar.
I heard tiny bits of dirt clatter against the roof of my trailer and my
first dreamy thought was, Damn that was close.
I assumed it had hit just outside the concrete barriers immediately
surrounding my room, but it had actually hit about 40 yards away. Outside people were scrambling around, most
of them sleepy looking like me, trying to find a bunker or some semblance of
order and explanation for this rude noise.
I found out later that a guy in a porta-john had been injured pretty
badly from the explosion and shrapnel, along with two others.
So
that’s the extent of any danger I’ve known intimately.
But
in general I don’t know that this war is a lot worse than any other. I could make the most hackneyed of examples
by comparing death rates from other conflicts.
I could say that the same numbers of troops as have been killed in Iraq were
killed in a matter of hours during the D-Day invasion, but what would be the
use? I could also say that that most
attractive of comparisons, the Vietnam Conflict, was responsible for more than
50,000 dead troops, more than ten times as many as in this war, but what would
be the point? If you were a 20 year-old
walking through Sadr City with 45 pounds of gee-whiz personal protective
technology on your person, searching for a local insurgent among the courtyards
and concrete houses, would you think to yourself, I’m glad I’m here and not crawling
up a beach in France?
That’s
of course a localized emotion, whereas I’m saying the war is less dangerous in
an analytical way. The same way
full-grown and well-paid adults in America
say that we need to put more troops into Iraq ,
or we need to pull more troops out of Iraq , or that our military is
breaking and we need to fix it…that’s the kind of dispassionate analysis I’m
using to say this: war used to be worse.
Distance is by far the greatest example of technological protection we
could ever hope to engineer, and our politicians and national voices are
furthering research in this area. They
carry the burdens of proof. I too was
much safer than I am now when I was at home watching the news and saying, We
need to pull more troops out of Iraq . I had the double bias: I was far away from
the less dangerous danger, and I would soon be going there. I like distance, its so much better than the
Individual Body Armor (IBA) or the Improved Outer Tactical Vest (IOTV), both of
which can stop a 7.62mm round, assuming it hits somewhere within the 500 square
inches or so of ballistic plates.
Distance can defeat any bullet, as long as you know how far away to
be. America
is far enough away from any bullet in Iraq , just so you know. You can stop worrying now.
Distance
works for us here, too. Artillery is the
finest example of the combination defensive/offensive approach to killing
people. It uses distance to its
advantage, and it’s scary precisely because it chips away at the armor of
distance for the bad guys. Another
example of a good use of the technology of distance: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAV). These are like radio-controlled
airplanes for fully grown men who want to take video of large swaths of the
countryside. I don’t know for sure if a
UAV has been used to kill anyone, but it’s a brilliant idea. I can imagine the kids lining up at the
recruiting office if it were made known that they could kill real people with
remote controlled airplanes. And what a
pool of qualified applicants! What boy
in America
has not been training his whole life to kill pictures of people from a
distance?
Isn’t
distance just a preferred means of separation?
I’m thinking here of separation as an idea, but also as a physical
state. We have to have separation,
especially in America . The separation of Church and State. The separate but equal powers of
government. And the notorious American
sense of personal space, which is nothing but an assertion of the need for
separation. I’ve heard it said that our
personal space is more voluminous than that of other cultures, and I’m sure it
is. Hey, we’ve earned it. It’s a part of us. How else could you muster the indignation and
pure rage required to pull someone from their car on the highway and beat the
hell out of them? Road rage is both a
symptom and a cause of separation. We
drive around separately, kept apart by the air between our cars and the
steel-and-plastic shells of our cars, and the notional separation we greedily
adopt as individuals at battle along the roadway trying to get where we’re
going, all others be damned. Violations
of our space infuriate us. At the same
time, fear of repudiation for violating the space of others forces us to remain
separate. I’m not going to wave at a
stranger who might be a crazy road-raging bastard.
There’s
that funny equation again: distance = safety.
Daily
life seems as absurd as anything. As an
acquaintance recently pointed out, what could be more absurd than, say, sitting
in traffic? There you sit, in a vehicle,
a result of tremendous technological advancement, built at great monetary and
ecological expense, on a road built with tremendous technology and at great
monetary and ecological expense, burning up a resource extracted by tremendous
technology and at great monetary and ecological expense, and I’m going
nowhere. Can such a pedestrian activity
as sitting in traffic really be considered as absurd as it is? I will be amazed if the men who run the
government ever get on TV and say that sitting in traffic is stupid. It is not in the nature of our leaders to
point out the obvious.
I
think the best thing we can do for ourselves is to come to terms with how
ridiculous we are. I have done
that. I know now that war is ridiculous
(though I always suspected it) because I’ve seen what the TV calls war. There’s a lot of business and quotidian,
bureaucratic ambling that keeps war moving along. There’s also a lot of money involved, which
seems strange. I would prefer that war
was just about killing people and involved less money. Money makes daily life so much more complicated,
so you can imagine how much it complicates something as simple as war. Paperwork follows money like a dog follows a
garbage truck, and in my opinion there’s too much paperwork required in this
war. So this simple, ridiculous
equation—less money equals less paperwork—should be applied. I’ll be the first to adopt this policy. Everyone, I think, knows the important and absurd
correlation between money and war, so of course if we adopt a policy of reduced
money input we’ll end the war. And if we
end the war then I can go home.
That has been my
only loss thus far, leaving home. A few
months ago I realized what a strange and ridiculous thing it is to mourn my
loss. What have I lost? I am in a foreign country at the behest of
men I will never meet, away from my lovely children and wife. But I’m not dead. To be alive is to gain something every
day. Being alive is my default vantage
point, but certainly it isn’t as common a thing as I suppose it to be. After all, look at how many people in our history
are dead.
Over
the years I have come to terms with life.
I like that it’s absurd; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t fit in so well. And so I have to look at myself every now and
then and laugh a little. Who is this sad
man? Why, he’s no sad man at all—it’s
just me! So I’m happy now, not because
my wife is still standing there watching my bus pull away, because she isn’t
there. She’s at home right now, possibly
thinking of how strange it was to watch a bus take her husband away. I’m happy now because she’s at home and that
is where I’m headed in the weeks to come.
Will we remember our sadness, or will our memories be overwhelmed by the
joy of reunion? I think our memories
will be overwhelmed. And this time I
will cast my sight outside of the bus and watch the crowd of happy families
draw near. I will forget the absurdity
of sadness, of war, of life. The
anticipation will be crushing, and the reunion as sweet and brilliant as an
orange.
(copyright 2014, Colin Cummings)
