Three years ago, Thanksgiving took an ironic turn that forever changed the way my family views the holiday season. On the day we were to give thanks for the many blessings that had befallen us, we put my brother on a plane for Iraq. As we watched him take the long walk to his plane, we were all keenly aware that that moment would define everything before and everything that followed.
Life would now be defined as Before Iraq and After Iraq.
The period After Iraq officially began on June 6, 2006 when a massive IED erupted through my brother’s Humvee. Shrapnel from the blast severed a major nerve in his leg, permanently paralyzing everything below his knee. Though it seems impossibly naïve, this was one scenario my family and I hadn’t paid much mind. Stubbornly attached to the most extreme of possibilities – death and complete invincibility – we had glossed over the very real threat of permanent injury.
Following that unpredictable event, the epilogue of my brother’s Iraq story has been similarly unexpected.
Each day of my brother’s tour hummed with a bewildering urgency. As my family and I went about those most mundane of activities – family dinners, paperwork, pumping gas – the subconscious awareness of my brother’s peril pulsed through us. Bizarre correlations began to develop. While my brother’s fears involved long stretches of road and bullets snapping by his ear, those of us on the home front were finding anxiety in loaves of bread and the sound of crickets. The Hum (as my family came to call it) merged the harmless with the threatening.
For most of my family, The Hum faded away when my brother returned to the States. Some of us haven’t been able to shake it. Our personal barometer permanently zeroed itself on the Iraq level of intensity and anxiety. So, even as I see my brother standing before me, it feels like something’s buzzing just around the corner.
While there were plenty of people as emotionally engaged as I was during my brother’s deployment, nobody was as practically engaged. Sharing frequent instant message conversations and screening dozens of e-mails, I got the must brutal, heart-breaking details of his daily life. I then disseminated the information on a blog I set up for friends and family.
That blog epitomizes my flawed expectations for life After Iraq. When my brother was deployed I posted at least once a day, sometimes several times. Looking back I’m astonished at the record we have of that period in our lives. Everyone was engaged. Everyone was involved. Every day had meaning. Since my brother’s return, my writing has fallen off precipitously. I thought the well of emotion and experience and education of our Iraq days would fuel an already politically astute and involved family for a long while. In truth, my brother’s survival eclipsed the furor that had been boiling for those months he was away. We nearly lost Andrew before we got him back, and even though we believe full-heartedly that the soldiers deserve our praise and passion, continuing my rhetoric seemed to be tempting fate. I had my brother back. We had dodged a bullet. We weren’t going to look back to see the next shot coming.
I’ve felt a sincere guilt letting the Iraq War dissolve into the background of my consciousness when it played so large a part of my family’s story, but I’m not alone in turning away from the conflict. The Project for Excellence in Journalism showed the Iraq conflict fell from 24 percent of cable network’s news coverage to one percent in the past two years. After the Iraq conflict ushered in a major political shift in the 2006 election, it was almost an afterthought in our Presidential election following the collapse of the economy. Why the dramatic drop-off in such a short time?
I can’t speak for the press, or the public as a whole, but for my family Iraq just became too awful to look at. My unfavorable view of the conflict only magnified after my brother’s experiences. Though my animus for the war in Iraq developed because it threatened to take my brother away, my present silence on the war now centers on the impossible position our nation has been put into.
Despite the bombast of our political pundits, withdrawing from Iraq will have grave consequences for Iraq and our nation. However, the conflict is also putting an unbearable strain on our military that hinders our ability to protect our nation from emerging threats. And unfortunately, politicians and the media have combined to make one of the most complicated military, as well as sociological, undertakings in this country’s history into a battle of slogans and buzzwords.
People think themselves real Americans for giving lip service to our troops and slapping a yellow ribbon on their bumper. That’s the least you can do for the men and women in Iraq. But the secret I learned during my brother’s deployment — and the secret that has paralyzed me since his return — is that’s just about the most you can do, too.
The Iraq conflict makes families feel utterly helpless. Families like mine that were so deeply involved in every daily turn of the war can’t help but shake their heads and look away when troubling news arrives from the Middle East. The war has even managed to paralyze our governing bodies. Though my family voted en masse for Barack Obama, we don’t cling to any delusions that he can successfully maneuver us out of the position we have put ourselves in. We’re hopeful, but we’re also realistic.
Iraq is more complicated than most of us either understand, or are willing to admit, and one has to search shamefully hard for those who can speak intelligently on the subject. And sadly, I think the majority of Americans would rather stick to their yellow ribbons and bumper sticker slogans than hear about the grave realities of Iraq. We have enough cognitive dissonance in our lives already.
There are no good answers to this conflict, and the suggestions that we should be listening to are longer than a fifteen second sound bite. The answers are better than “stay the course” and more nuanced than “bring the troops home.” They’re all hard, and they’re all costly, but the men and women who are fighting over there deserve better than what we’ve given them lately. When I start hearing decision-makers in Washington addressing Iraq like adults, and not like sparring cheerleaders, maybe I’ll become engaged again. Until then, it’s just too hard to watch.
