Scarred - Or Soulless Ice

“It is in the nature of soldiers who have been to war and returned to not share these thoughts but I believe these are “times that try men’s souls” and these things need to be said.” – Archibald MacLeish

Each day when I go to my computer the first thing I do is go to the Iraq war casualties website and check on the numbers of soldiers killed and wounded in action and the numbers of Iraqi’s killed. Today those numbers were 2,732 soldiers killed in action, 19,910 soldiers wounded in action and 43,546 – 48,343 Iraqi’s killed. Day in and day out the numbers go up and up and as they do I ask myself that eternal question, why?

It seems to me that in almost all of my posts I write these numbers and even though I have no definitive answer as to why they are dying I do have an answer as to why I write the numbers. I do this in hopes that someone will – really - understand what these numbers mean. That, that someone will “get it”, and repeat it and then another someone will understand and then another and still another and finally the 300 million people that are estimated to be breathing in this country this month will all understand. That they will understand that with each of these deaths a piece of us dies and with each of these wounds we are wounded and it is only they who can stop the killing and maiming.

To that someone who might be listening let me share this with you. Regardless of the circumstances; “justly” or “unjustly” the taking of a human life is an act that never leaves you. Knowing that you were personally responsible for taking a human life leaves an eternal, deep, and painful scar on your soul; at least I believe that if you are human it does. Let me share one other thing. The eyes are indeed windows into the soul and I know that when I look at the faces and into the eyes of those who are orchestrating the war in Iraq I do not see scarred souls but instead I see the soulless ice of those who do not care.

Each day as I look at my newspaper it is not the reality of stories of dying soldiers and civilians I see spread across the page but the sad soap opera that is our administration in Washington D.C. It is stories of corruption, graft, and moral bankruptcy that I see and then, even further back after the ads for cars and furniture and every other consumable good, I see the lone article with the number of lives given and taken, buried in the pages of tomorrows fish wrap, without ceremony or homage and before their bodies have hardly grown cold.

I close with another quote from Archibald MacLeish – “We are deluged with facts, but we have lost or are losing our human ability to feel them.”

Those Are The Sergeant Majors Thoughts On That.