Young Americans in camouflage evoke feelings: pride in some, anguish in others.

The trick is to sustain those feelings as war images and information assault the psyche.

This war is in our faces, day and night. It dominates the headlines. The front pages of newspapers show terrified children, wounded women, soldiers poised to kill.

With journalists filing live reports from the front, the war in Iraq is a 24/7 TV series. Painfully real, yet eerily surreal.

It is surreal because what viewers see and hear is a filtered version of war. We don’t feel the heat of the desert, the adrenaline, the fear of a 19-year-old far from home. We don’t know the hunger and homesickness of the conscripted Iraqi soldier forced at gunpoint to fight, sustained only by meager rations of rice and bread.

We don’t see the killing, the blood, the dust and chaos of battle.

As you view war through that filter, we urge you not to become inured to the horrors.

Another seven or nine or 15 U.S. troops dead in battle should shock and sadden as much as the first. Someone’s son or daughter has died. The grief will last long after coalition forces mop up in Baghdad.

There will be little consolation for those families, or for the families of dead Iraqis.

Whether you believe this war is just or unconscionable, don’t forget how you felt when the first war toll sounded.
Sacre bleu!


A U.S. congressman has asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop buying headstones for national cemeteries from a French-owned marble manufacturer.

Why?

Because the company is French and France opposed the war in Iraq.

“To force the relatives of our servicemen and women fighting the war in Iraq to mourn their loss under a headstone supplied by a company with French allegiance is an insult that no American soldier or their family should be forced to endure,” wrote Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo.

McInnis’ histrionics are aimed at a Paris-based company whose subsidiary supplies the marble headstones for graves at Arlington National Cemetery.

McInnis called that “obviously inappropriate.”

We call it a stretch.

No one, including the families of fallen soldiers, ought to blame an individual business for its country’s political position.

That’s obviously inappropriate.
Maine rallies


Mainers are generous folks.

They have swamped the Maine Army National Guard with mail and packages for U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf. They have created a four-month backlog of “quality of life” donations to the American Red Cross’ war effort.

That’s a commendable tribute in a state not known for its wealth.
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