Support The Imaginary Troops

I've been struggling to articulate what most unnerves me about the Kerry flap for a couple of days, trying to figure out how to say this without it being ripped out of context mere microseconds after posting. Not easy. But let's start with the education issue: There are a lot of different estimates as to the education level of the troops in Iraq. The best conclusion you can draw is that they're relatively educated (and rarely uneducated), working-to-middle class, and heavily Southern and Southwestern. In other words, they're not sons of privilege, but nor are they refuges from the streets. It's the American Dream with guns.

But I loathe the tendency -- by politicians and pundits, liberals and conservatives -- to dreamily speak of the great sacrifice, magnificent courage, inspiring intellect, and extraordinary characters of our troops. It's bullshit. And it's bullshit designed to make us feel better, so we don't have to face what we've done to these children, and don't have to imagine the toll a warzone takes on real humans, rather than imagined supermen.

They're not doing a magnificent job. They're not approaching each day with stoic courage and endless optimism. They're doing their best. These are kids. I knew them in high school. They entered the military because they sought discipline, or loans, or redemption, or very occasionally, honor. They were not a wiser breed, or a braver strain -- they were just kids, they made a decision that seemed right at the time, and now they're doing their damndest to survive. It comforts us to speak of them all as Rhode Scholars, automatons who run on courage and faith and perform with grace and cheer. It comforts us to speak of them like that because it allows us to deny the image of twentysomethings lying terrified in the desert, straining to make it through that day, and the next, and the one after it. By so lavishly honoring them, we transform our mental picture of who fights in this war, and we allow their imagined stoicism to ease our onrushing guilt.

I had a friend who ended up a biohazard unit during the early days of the invasion. He's an amazing person: gentle, empathic, wise, and courageous. He went to a top college and enlisted after 9/11. He's precisely the soldier we like to describe. But he spent his days terrified, waiting for calls back home, waiting for his tour to close. He performed his duties well and displayed enormous personal strength, but he was just a kid, and his expression of patriotism had landed him in hell. He made that choice, and he bore it well. But he bore it as we all would -- with fear, and imperfection, and frustration, and pain. It wasn't a magnificent experience. It wasn't a war novel. The difference between going to war and imagining it is that when you daydream about battle, it's hellishness takes on a sort of beauty, it allows men to emerge heroes and courage to reign. In our minds, it can be magnificent. For those fighting it, it isn't. Homelife takes on the glow of heaven.

That doesn't mean war is never necessary, or battles should never be fought. But society must reckon with their toll more realistically. We shouldn't deny the horrors of combat by overwriting the humanity of those conducting it. It doesn't support the troops to heap them in false praise and projection. It supports us, keeps us warm and safe in the invented knowledge that war is fought by warriors, not children. Which is why, in the end, it doesn't much matter if they're educated, or rich, or strong, or brave. Neither the kids I know who enlisted nor the (many more) who stayed behind were equipped for such a searing experience. And no Ivy degree would have prepared them for it. But those who went endured despite their unreadiness. And we who stayed behind do them a disservice, we dishonor the troops, if we pretend they were somehow prepared for this life, rather than thrust into it.