The Economy of Death
February 8, 2008
Blood and bodies were everywhere,” said U.S. Airman Ryan Hager, as he described carrying the bodies of slain Iraqis. That night Hager could not eat because “the lasagna looked like brain matter.” Hager was eighteen. Now, five years later, the Louisiana native has two children, one whose birth he missed because of the war.
I spoke with Hager and ten other members of the Air Force in the Atlanta airport; they had come from base training in Valdosta, Georgia. Within the hour they would be on a plane to Iraq. This would be Hager’s 14th military tour.
Jeremy, age 23, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, entered the Air Force after high school. This would be his fourth year in Iraq. Softly, he explained to me, “Just because you are fighting does not mean you agree with everything. War means casualties, war means loss. If you haven’t experienced a death, or been there, you can’t understand.”
For five years we have been fed the cryptology of war — the lies and the half-truths. Under our noses the truth comes home. In body bags. Where is the fury? Where is the sorrow? As Plato said in the Phaedrus, we are neither cattle nor sheep. We must use our voices, our minds.
Jeremy said he spent his free moments in Iraq weight-training, viewing movies at his base, and fixing his defective humvee. “It’s stupid, American [civilians] having Hummers,” he scoffed. “Buy a Jeep.”
Jeremy watched their military packs, green with wide hip straps, while the others dispersed in the airport for lunch. Billy, the youngest of the group at age 18 and a denizen of Salisbury, MA, returned with a sandwich. “Are there a lot of hippies at Tufts?” he queried. “Some,” I said. He laughed. But the laughter could not cut the edge or dispel the tensity of the group.
Of the Airmen and women, only Jeremy had attended college for any length of time. When I mentioned that my school was small, he made eye contact with me and said, “There’s nothing small about an education.”
Billy had enlisted for six years in the Air Force — two more years than the required four — for the “money and the stripes.” His mother vehemently opposed the decision. The two are no longer on speaking terms.
The one U.S. Airwomen of the group declined to speak to me, even as above our heads the story of Maria Lauterbach played on television. Lauderbach, a twenty-year old marine was raped, murdered and burned in a backyard fire pit by a comrade in North Carolina. In the military, sexual harassment persists but is ignored. Meanwhile, attention is trained on the killer, who himself will likely die at the hands of the state he enlisted for and swore to serve.
As of January 31, 2008, 422 Californians have been slain in Iraq, as well as 362 Texans, 167 Floridians, 165 Ohioans, 128 Pennsylvanians, thousands of other Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to icasualties.com, cited by the BBC and the New York Times.
Can anyone oscillate between anarchy and peace; bombings and sleep; mayhem and kissing your child goodnight? According to a recent New York Times report, there were 121 cases in which veterans committed a killing in this country after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. These killings were attributed to combat trauma.
And what, then, does this tell us? We must fight with our words, voices, and most importantly, ballots. War does not help the dead. We must shut down Guantanamo. Reinstate habeas corpus. Obey our Constitution. Bring our soldiers home. I asked one soldier if he was going to vote in the presidential election — he said he would try, but didn’t know the protocol for Americans casting absentee ballots in Iraq. What sick irony if our American Service Members had more difficulty voting than the Iraqis they were supposedly instructing in the ways of democracy.
We need leaders who believe in people, who believe in weapons of life — food, houses, education — not in weapons of death. Boston Globe columnist James Carroll once wrote, “Life is too short not to find something else to do besides killing.” If you care about the economy, put a price on your own life. We have an economy of profligacy that says we can run the market into the ground, that people are expendable, that killing is normative.
Since the war began, the ratio of power has not changed. It has always been 300 million to one — Americans vs. a president or his lasting legacy made real in a Supreme Court that is not responsive to the peoples’ wishes, that chooses when and when not to take cases of the utmost importance, and above all else, may not once be held accountable by the people they serve for the entirety of their remaining lives. The people do not choose, but they suffer the enduring consequences for years to come.
Take my cousin, for example, a Vietnam veteran who is dying of Agent Orange. He sleeps in the day and is terrorized by the thought of bombs detonating at night. Mark could never hold a steady job, convulses at certain sounds, and never married. He was recently evicted from his apartment and may now be living on the street. He is a living casualty of the thing called war. Meanwhile, in Iraq, we’re still dropping bombs.