The Reality of War Bumps Up Against Bumperticker Sloganeering

Andy writes:

Dear Ted,

In September of 2002, as I started my junior year of college I was unfortunate enough to find myself stuck with a U.S. Marine for a roommate.
I’d never felt comfortable around military types. In high school the ROT-Cees were the lowest of the low, degenerates well on their way to jail if not for the saving grace of wanting to shoot something the defence of the country.
Subsequently in college, when I left my home city of Chicago to the boonies of Illinois, I found the Jarheads, Jarhead-Wannabes, grunts, reservists, and even military fan-boys with too many toy warplanes of an even more savage ilk, all too eager to swat down upstart darker-skinned peoples of the world. As I once quipped to a good friend, “If they didn’t have the U.S. military, they’d probably be skinning cats in their parents basements.” You can gather then, that being quartered with a Marine was unenjoyable at best and, especially when the Commandent-in-Chief began his Anti-Saddam sabre rattling, it was completely infuriating.
My roommate specialized in disarming chemical weapons. Not content to do welding at a technical college, he had gone into the Marine Corps with the sole career goal of having being able to retire at age fourty-five. What was he doing in college with this already grand scheme cooked up? A higher pay bracket in the officer corps. Clearly I was living with a genius. This became more obvious to me as the weeks rolled on and the man would sit in our room during the evenings watching CNN and giving his expert commentary. He would surmise how many weapons Saddam had, where they were stashed, and precisely what vicious nuclear and biological terrors Saddam had stockpiled against us. And he would, at length, orate on the legal and ethical reasons that Saddam needed to be removed from power.
Suffice it to say, what this man was selling, I was not buying.
Our arguments bacame progressively more fierce. A cold war had erupted in my dorm room and there was no way in hell I was backing down. Sure, I couldn’t prove Saddam didn’t have Weapons of Mass Destruction, but let’s not forget that the U.S. Government has had it’s own agenda whether the voters liked it or not before, and I could not believe that human slime like Bush and Rumsfeld didn’t have an ulterior motive. (I think we on the Left shouldn’t gloat, but so far we’ve been right about global warming, absence of weapons of mass destruction, and right about now I’d bet money on Peak Oil hitting next year.)
So the semester flew by and there was continued discord in Room 158, and winter break passed, and being away from Private Nimrod was good. Upon my return to campus after break though, he dropped a bombshell. His unit would likely be sent to Iraq.
I know it’s cruel to laugh at someone else’s misfortune, but this? It warmed my heart to see this doofus terrified out of his wits every night as he watched the news knowing that at some point he might actually have to deal with shooting and being shot at.
Suddenly his tune changed; his dissertations on the alleged weapons weren’t about where, what and why we needed to destroy them, all of a sudden, it was about how there was no conclusive evidence of any weapons anywhere, suddenly, Bush had transformed in my roommate’s eyes from brave leader swinging a sword of righteousness to a chimp flailing his wiener.
When we actually started the Invasion in March, my roommate became weird and withdrawn. He even became introspective at points, questioning whether or not his was a wise career choice. Clearly he had never actually expected to do any fighting, kinda funny, with being in the military and all.
By April, the man had hit rock bottom. Already an intensely mediocre student he stopped going to class altogether, broke up with his girlfriend, and often wondered aloud if he would even be alive by this time next year. And always I was there to provide little or no comfort, because this turn of events was comical to me, and I felt, wholly deserved. After the school year ended I lost all contact with him, and good riddance. He was a filthy, loud-mouthed, inconsiderate brute and a borderline sociopath.
Wherever he ended up, whether barracked in north central Illinois, with the perilous threat of sudden deployment hanging over his head, or actually being sent to the middle east, this was what he chose, and he faced the consequences of his choice with fear that he should recognize, this is after all what he seemed to want to do to poor people all over the globe, scare them into submission.
Periodically, I check news from his hometown to see what became of him. If he came back either a hero or a corpse, this would be front page news in Will County, Illinois, so far, nothing. I truly hope he comes back and decides to drop his vocation of destruction and get a real job, but I don’t think it likely, his type never learns easily, if ever. After all, if all the standard bearers and flag-wavers had a lick of sense they might have recalled the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, or that FDR had some advanced warning of Japan’s coming attack on Pearl Harbor and realized that a lot of times politicians will lie to advance their own agenda.
The voters, the Senators, the Representatives, the soldiers who were “duped” can claim hindsight is 20/20 all they like, but I think these last terrible five years under Bush should just go to show that a little well-placed skepticism can go a long way.

Thanks, Andy, for a point of view widely articulated throughout the country’s living rooms, but rarely in public.