War and remembrance
We were late setting out, my son and I, for a Memorial Day bike ride, and by the time we hit the road the parades had ended and the veterans’ monuments had emptied out. What remained were flags and bouquets, and the whiff of roasting meat from backyard barbecues.
That’s a typical Memorial Day for a Baby Boomer, where remembering is only background
for a welcome day off. I don’t know anyone who either died in combat or who is serving in Iraq, and don’t know anyone with a relative or friend serving either. You could more easily connect me to Kevin Bacon than an infantryman.
Fewer Americans have personal ties to the military than ever before, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The men and women who fought and died in World War II did so for an essential cause. But we should never forget the lost and shattered lives, and the toll the war placed on those back home. We should be careful to honor the Greatest Generation and support today’s troops without glorifying war itself.
Yet the lack of personal ties leaves many Americans at a remove from the war in Iraq. The war managed to capture the public’s imagination only as it played out in a proxy fight between Bush and Kerry. Since the election, it has retreated to a low hum, and daily casualty reports containing the names of other people’s kids, from other parts of the country.
It’s not so much apathy as futility — the feeling that neither continuing the fight nor pulling out is a good option. That futility has even stifled opponents of the war, who decry the decision to invade the country in the first place but have no earthly idea how to end what the Bush Administration started. The intractability of the war — personified by Kerry and his quite-understandable inability to come up with a better idea — managed to return Bush to the White House, but it also returned America to a state of triviality and seeming indifference.
What breaks through this indifference are the stories told by journalists who still think the war matters, and not only as a background for the perennial political squabbling between Democrats and Republicans. The dwindling pack of foreign correspondents has professionalized a role once played by tens of thousands of amateur storytellers — the grunts who took pen to paper to tell folks back at home what it’s like “over there.” (The best of these have been collected and published by the historian Andrew Carroll, who like the soldiers themselves is neither a friend nor relative of mine.)
There is no overestimating the service provided by a reporter like Jessie Graham, who recently interviewed a trio of Jewish soldiers for the Web site Nextbook.org. The NPR program Day to Day recently aired excerpts from Graham’s interview with Specialist Joe Kashnow, a 26-year-old who served as a cavalry scout with the Fourth Infantry Division, Third Brigade.
“I was wounded in combat during a routine convoy escort mission by a roadside bomber…,” Kashnow explains matter-of-factly. “The shrapnel entered into the front of my leg. It’s the lower shin area. It broke the larger bone which is the tibia, in a couple of different places. It broke the fibula, the smaller supporting bone. It destroyed a couple of small muscle groups. It destroyed two of the three arteries in the leg, and generally made a big mess of itself.”
Kashnow attended day school for a while, but unlike a lot of his classmates dreamed of joining the military “as far back as I can remember.” He considered it an honor to serve “as a Jew and as an American citizen, as opposed to just something that some people had to do because they couldn’t find a real job.”
Kashnow describes his struggle to get kosher rations at the front, the tallit and tefillin he unwrapped for morning prayers, and the petty anti-Semitism of fellow soldiers. “I think that as Jews we have something to give back to our country as we do in other fields,” he says. “And as Jews we have something to be grateful for no matter how religious we are, simply for the fact that we can walk the streets and not have to worry about an attack or any kind of problem. This is a country where we are allowed to succeed, and we are allowed to prosper, and we do have, I think, a need to give something back to that.”
The soldier also describes his rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. “Where I’ve been going for treatment, you see the people who are really hurt, and you look at them, and you look at yourself, and you say, ‘I don’t even belong in the same room with these guys.’ And the way I see it, as long as I didn’t come home in a box, I’m very happy.”
It’s only at this point in the interview that Kashnow explains that doctors plan to amputate his lower right leg.
“I don’t regret what’s happened,” he says. “I have been occasionally — and I’ve tried to stay away from this because it’s just not a healthy way to be. There have been days that I’ve been bitter about being hurt. Not that I was wounded in the Army, but simply that I didn’t have the function that I wanted. But I’ve managed to keep that pretty well controlled. This is what happened, and if I sit around and mope it’s really not going to get any better, so there’s not a whole lot of point to it. And that’s pretty much the way I’ve seen this. I came home alive. And I came home almost completely intact.”
Kashnow’s story does not bring even a hint of clarity to what should be done “over there.” But his words — simple, honest, humble — remind us that at the center of this difficult war are folks like you and me.