Stoopid Stuff

Pink Boxers

I have to admit this made me smile, and I can't deny I not only enjoyed, but appreciated what Secretary Gates had to say about it. But it's interesting to take a moment and ask ourselves why it's newsworthy.

As much as Americans approve of military solutions to all sorts of intractable problems, worship and even fetishize the military and call for acts of extreme violence from invasions to air strikes with minimal compunction, very few Americans have ever had to come to grips with the realities of life in a war zone. While they are perfectly able to conceptualize, it is well nigh impossible for most Americans to viscerally understand how a family might live day in and day out, being startled awake and rushing out into the dark and chaos to fight or to flee. The easy death, the endless horror, the constant fear, the disease, the destruction, the smoke, the smell.

Even American soldiers, with their vaunted reputation for taking some of the comforts of home to the front lines of battle, have to live wound tight, on a razor's edge, understanding that at any time peaceful quiet can be shattered by gunfire and explosions, and there can be no hesitation in response. Anyone who has tried to sleep in a war zone has had to make the most careful of calculations - Should I take off my boots? My pants? Where should I put my weapon, my magazines, my grenades, my helmet? Should I keep my pistol in my rack? A knife?

For the residents, of the battle areas, the families with farms and livestock and children and pets, the calculations are harder, and the choices fewer. It seems certain to me that if Americans had a better understanding of the misery, the disruption, the tragedy that is unleashed on regular people every time there is a battle or an air strike, they would be much more circumspect in their desire to see deadly force employed as a routine matter of policy. It is unfair that a nation can unleash so much death and suffering, so much fear and horror, and suffer so few consequences for it. It's all gotten too easy, too mundane.

Perhaps the sight of a young man rushing to the fight with his comrades in boxers and flip-flop sandals can teach us, as a people, a little something about life in war. About what it demands, and what it costs...

posted by mikey @ 1:01 PM