The Weight of What-If

Iraq is the synthesis. More than half of all Americans feel that this war was a miscalculation, yet they will still stop in airports or on the street to shake the hands of those in uniform and thank them for their service. But you can't expect people who are invested in the valor of those young men and women to be reconciled to a premature end to their lives. War is the stuff of political analysis, but the troops are a human-interest story. For many, people trump policy.

The rationale for going to war has to meet many tests, but one of them—perhaps the most important one—is whether the mission is strong enough to carry the weight of so many ghosts and so much misery, here and in Iraq, too. The grieving spouses raising children alone, the broken parents who wake each morning to a gray day. The amputees swinging down the street on prosthetics, the addicts who still hear IEDs exploding in their heads. The legacy of what-ifs, of abbreviated and amended lives.

Maybe any conflict will topple under such a burden. Maybe the spectacle of hometown kids' leaving home to be killed or maimed is bearable only when it's given a more antiseptic name: troop strength, casualties, something less human. That most macho of American novelists, Ernest Hemingway, reflects that in "A Farewell to Arms" when an Italian soldier talks about how sick he is of the whole thing. "There is nothing worse than war," he says, adding, "What is defeat? You go home ... One side must stop fighting. Why don't we stop fighting?"

Or perhaps it is another Hemingway quote that is more apt, seeing the black bunting over the firehouse in an American town or Iraqi mourners gathered around a child's grave: "The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places."

© 2007