For Every Death, A Hole in the World

[babylonsister]

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/every-death-hole-world


For Every Death, A Hole in the World
By Susie Madrak Monday May 25, 2009 12:00pm



Julia Mathes, the widow of Army Specialist Marcus Mathes, drapes herself over his casket at Zephyrhills Municipal Airport. His body was flown in for his funeral and burial. (Photo - Christine Delessio)


This is something I wrote for Memorial Day 2005 and I run it every year:

Soldiers are not chunks of identical clay; each of them has a story, their own reasons for being caught in a war.

Brave? Maybe - sometimes, under some conditions. Scared, mostly. The younger they are, the more likely their presence had to do with restlessness, cockiness. The need to be part of a winning team, the desire to even a score. Kick ass, take names. Kill them all, let God sort them out.

The older they are, the more realistic they are. This was a steady paycheck, or a way to supplement the one they already had. When they join, it's with their eyes on the future benefit. When they're in the middle of a war, they think only of surviving the next five minutes. Please, God, please. Let me see my family again.

And when they die in the war, each death leaves a hole in the world. It's important to remember that, to not see them as a monolithic casualty list or as an acceptable loss.

No loss is acceptable. Ask the parents, the spouses, the children. They try. They tell themselves stories of nobility, sacrifice, a greater cause. They cover it up with the ritual rhetoric. But deep down, they must wonder.



Here is how to count the cost: In high school graduation pictures that will never be replaced with wedding pictures. In wedding rings that will never be worn smooth by years. By the daughters who will walk down the aisle with an uncle or brother instead of Dad. By the sons who will find themselves angry and lost, not understanding why. The children who will hear about their mother's eyes, their father's chin but won't ever see themselves reflected in that face.

By the parents who now understand the quiet obscenity of outliving their own children.

Each and every one of these deaths left a hole in the world. That is why we count them.

They mattered.

[Patchuli]

1. K&R

and thank you to all the Americans who gave everything for us all.

[tomreedtoon]

2. I think you're wrong about the young people, BabylonSister.

As Michael Moore showed in Fahrenheit 9/11, many young men and women joined the military because there was simply nothing else for them to do. That was true at the time the film was made, in Moore's beloved and abused Detroit, and now it's true all over the nation.

No jobs, no education worth a damn, not even the potential of making a life. That's why many young people went into the meat grinder that was Bush and Cheney's war for oil.

In fact, I sometimes wonder if they deliberately helped the economy to crash to make millions more young people decide to risk their lives in this pointless war. When you get hungry, recruiting sure starts looking good...

It has nothing to do with patriotism, God, country, kicking ass or any of those other things. That's the mantra of old right-wingers who didn't go and never will go to war.

Yes, they leave emotional holes. But they entered the war to get out of the hole that was once called the American economy. So the net number of holes has not increased. It's an ugly form of math, but that's the math used by the megacorporations in charge.