That number is now over 1,600. The number of Iraqi deaths is somewhere between 16,000 – 100,000.
The number of dead American troops passed the 1,000 mark the in the same way that number passed the milestones of 100 and 500, without pausing, without looking back, and most importantly of all, without stopping.
As a peace activist and a military veteran living outside of Ft. Bragg, NC, I’m able to see the effect these milestones have on a vulnerable community. They trigger a flood of letters from military wives angry as their husbands, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, prepare for yet another deployment to the place that generates these milestones of the dead.
I get letters from young vets that say things like “I was stationed at Ft Bragg for about a year. I spent four months with [Operation Iraqi Freedom]…if I had it all to do over again I would have signed the conscientious objector paperwork. My only other sibling, my brother, was already deployed over there.”
When George Bush was avoiding service in Southeast Asia and, as it turns out, in the “champagne” unit of the Texas Air National Guard that his connections got him into, my father was bleeding in a rice paddy in South Vietnam.
When George Bush was failing in business for the third or fourth time, I was a nineteen-year-old father of two attending National Guard drills on weekends and working during the week on a construction job for minimum wage and no benefits.
When George Bush was busy enacting tax cuts for people far out of my bracket in 2001, my teenage son was enlisting in the Navy, taking the gamble that in this, the richest country in the world, he wouldn’t have to lose his life to get educational benefits and health care.
The men and women in the US military, stationed in over 120 countries but concentrated in Iraq and Afghanistan are not tools to be used by any president or any party to ensure political success and a stranglehold on power. These men and women serving in combat zones are our children, our spouses, and our fellow workers. They are human beings who are dying and being maimed while being asked to kill and maim in return for a cause based on coldly calculated political expediency, based on profits for an elite minority, and based on the selfish ambitions of a class of people whose children and spouses are very clearly not wearing uniforms.
No matter what the recruiters and TV commercials say, the military is not a jobs program. Unemployment is higher among veterans than among non-veterans. I learned to adjust artillery fire during my time in the service, not something for which there is much of a civilian demand. For the thousands of former GIs whose service left them physically scarred, productive employment may turn out to be as elusive as the enemy they pursued in the wars they fought. The Pentagon admits that at least one in five returning soldiers is facing the frightening prospect of post-traumatic stress disorder while others face only the relatively minor problems of anxiety and depression.
Nor is the military a way for many to go to college. The majority of those who pay into the current GI college fund end up getting no money from the government and often they don’t even get their own money back. These twenty-something ex-service people have families to support and debts to pay that make pursuing a college education a remote dream.
It is not OK with me that they asked my father, that they asked me and that they are asking my child to possibly risk it all for a country that has new fighter jets and old schools, that has political conventions with budgets that are growing and public health care systems with budgets that are shrinking, that has free speech for politicians who seldom tell the whole truth and New York City jail cells for passionate young activists who confront those politicians. It is not OK with me that the military punishes those within its ranks who speak out against this war that so many in this country despise. We are told that those soldiers are fighting for our freedom while they are denied the basic rights many of us take for granted.
Primary among those rights is the right to die of old age, not as a result of improvised bombs in a country far from home.
