Collateral damage

In the ugliness of war, particularly when it is as tortured and misshapen as what we've created in Iraq, it can be easy to forget that much of that ugliness is born and fostered and fed on a very personal level.

The AP recently ran a profile on a man whose son was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq; about a year afterward, the man himself was in Iraq, manning a machine gun just as his son had before he was killed. The man had already been planning to join the National Guard with an eye toward going to the Middle East, but now he was armed with grief and hatred.

What is sad, and scary, and even somewhat sickening, is how the tragic and wasteful death of this man's son seemed to only reinforce ignorant and uninformed ideas that are echoed repeatedly by the Bush Administration. The man is overcoming his need for revenge, but he hasn't even begun to grapple with his need for an enemy, a bogeyman that is equal parts bigotry and misdirected fear.

The article begins with this:

Father Loses Taste for Revenge in Iraq

By Charels J. Hanley, AP Special Correspondent

AL-ASAD, Iraq - In the desert chill, on the lonely nighttime roads of
Iraq, Joe Johnson looks out over his machine gun and thinks of Justin. It was on Easter morning 2004 that a chaplain and a colonel appeared on Joe and Jan Johnson's Georgia doorstep with the news. Justin, the boy Joe had fished and hunted with, the soldier son who'd gone off to Iraq a month earlier, was suddenly dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb planted in a Baghdad slum.

Today it's Joe who mans the M-240 atop a Humvee, warily watching the sides of the road, an unlikely Army corporal at 48, a father who came here for revenge, a Christian missionary on a crusade against Islam, and a man who, after six months at war, is ready to go home.

...

Why did he do it? The wiry lean Georgian, an easy-talking man with a boyish, sunburned face, tried to answer the question that won't go away.

"It's a lot of things combined," he said. "One, a sense of duty. I was pissed off at the terrorists for 9/11 and other atrocities. Second, I'd only trained. I wanted combat." And then, he said, "there's some revenge involved. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't."

I need to point out, again, that the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11 were not from Iraq, they were with Al Qaeda, an international terrorist group with bases of operation in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and elsewhere. The fact that people still don't understand this distinction amazes me, and I lay the blame with the Administration (which deliberately created the confusion to pave the path to war) and the media (which failed to ask the hard questions when it was easier to go along, and continues in failing to properly inform their audience). That said, I can't even imagine what it's like to lose a child, and can only begin to understand his anger and frustration.

But there was more on the mind of this man who has done Church of God missionary work as far afield as Peru and the Arctic.

"I don't really have love for Muslim people," Johnson said. "I'm sure there are good Muslims. I try not to be racist." Although he hasn't read the Quran, or spoken with Muslims, he has "heard" the Islamic holy book "teaches to kill Jews and infidels. And it's hard to love people who hate you."

This is frightening. I'm trying not to be too judgmental, so let me just say that I thought the cornerstone of Christian thought was supposed to be a love of all. Also, I have a problem when people base their generalized opinion on a subject they know nothing about, especially when there is seemingly no intention of learning anything at all. Finally, "Muslim" is not race, the Quran doesn't teach those things, and the vast majority of Muslims don't hate anybody.

His battalion exits Iraq in early May, when Johnson's own enlistment term, coincidentally, expires. "That's it," he said, no re-enlistment for him.

But what about revenge?

"If I go home and didn't kill a terrorist, it's not going to ruin my life," he said. "Maybe I'd just as soon not. I don't know what it would do to my head."

For the most part, the people fighting in Iraq are not terrorists - they are Iraqis who are fighting against what they see as the invading force of a large, powerful country, which has since occupied their territory. I'd wager there are many Americans who, if you asked them what they would do if the U.S. were invaded, would tell you they'd do much the same thing. The Minutemen are already trying, and its chosen enemy, conveniently enough, are poor people trying to better their lives in a country that is inexplicably still seen as a beacon of freedom and hope. At the very least, this man has gained some perspective. At least, I hope so.

From the beginning, I've felt what we've been doing in the Middle East is wrong. This man's tragedy, and the deeper tragedy he represents for people affected on both sides of this war, shows just how wrong, and how ugly, it is.