By Charles P. Pierce
November 2, 2008
... The country went to a strange place almost from the beginning, when medievalist fanatics launched airplanes into buildings, and the anchorpeople said the country was At War, and the president told us to go to Disney World. Now, seven years later, in the middle of the election season, it almost seems as if the war has slipped the country's mind. Information about the conflict always has been tightly controlled -- no photographs of coffins being unloaded -- and the news divisions have largely moved elsewhere, anyway. Local news covers the tearful side of it -- tearful departures, tearful homecomings, and the occasional tearful funeral. As it happens, 64 people from Massachusetts have died in Iraq, and another 495 have been wounded. On television, right before the weather, we even might have learned some of their names.
The detailed costs of the war, estimated to one day surpass a trillion dollars, are not even included in the federal budget. Small wonder then that in five polls conducted by various organizations in September -- which is to say, polls conducted before the massive economic collapse obliterated the entire news cycle -- the "war in Iraq" could not muster more than 13 percent of the responses when people were asked what issue was most important to them in choosing the next president. Even during Vietnam, the war was vivid. Its impact on the country, and on its politics, was immediate, most notably its impact on the presidential election of 1968. Now, 40 years later, this war -- a war that is more unpopular than Vietnam was during that election 40 years ago -- is very nearly an afterthought. The country has never fought a war like this. The country has never fought a war as subtext. The war is being fought off the screen, off the books, and off the radar ...
Malley is 57, and he's been in the Army since 1996, but that's not his whole story. On his fatigues, incongruously, he wears the dolphins of a Navy submariner and a submariner's war patrol pin. In 1969, Malley was a student at St. Francis College in Loreto, Pennsylvania. He was active in protests against the Vietnam War, but his conscience bothered him. He couldn't justify protesting something he didn't think he understood. So he joined the Navy, and he wound up on the patrol boats that plied the rivers in Vietnam, seeking to interdict Viet Cong supply lines. (These were boats that went through waterways too small to accommodate the larger Swift boats like the ones on which Senator John Kerry served.) Afterward, Malley served on a destroyer escort, and then, after a term at submarine school, he went out on the fast attack subs. "Big and black and you never come back," he jokes. "You're always deployed" ...
She joined for the benefits, just like all those commercials back in the 1990s said she should. One of eight children in a family from a small New Hampshire town, she joined because the Army said it would pay for her college. Somero enlisted in 1995, and she went through basic training a year later. Somero opted to join the active-duty reserves, which made the Army her full-time job. Like Malley, she felt the ground shift under her after the 9/11 attacks. She was assigned to work on what was called the SRP -- the Soldiers Readiness Project. The program suddenly took on a fierce kind of urgency ...
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/11/02/the_forgotten_war/?page=1
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