Surreal
A war unfolds thousands of miles away. I sit in my living room and watch the images flash across the television screen. At home I’m captivated by it. At work, I’m distracted by it.
Bagdad lights up in their very own, and very real, fireworks show. Bush stops by to tell us of the difficulties ahead. A representative of MSNBC rides along with our troops into Southern Iraq. Someone from Fox News chats along with us while gunfire echoes in the background. I can’t help but feel that something is lost in the translation. Unprecedented access can bring us close to battle but not to the feelings of war.
Reports of enemy casualties don’t faze me. Reports of our own dead send a chill down my spine. The sight of Iraqi police literally beating the bushes for a downed pilot that didn’t exist made the hair on my neck stand on end. Shots are fired into the water for an imaginary POW. Real POWs are paraded in front of the camera.
A ticker scrolls along the bottom of the screen. As the fighting intensifies, so do the reports from the field. The big news of the night speaks of a suspected chemical weapons plant – 100 acres of it. We need no reminder why we’re here.
I’m proud to be part of a country that stands up to the despots of the world. I’m proud of our soldiers and the work they do. The television gives me a cloudy lens in which to spy on their frightening world. I pray for our soldiers. I pray for our enemy. I pray for the day when I’m happy to turn the TV off.
Porter
March 25th, 2003 at 10:24 pm #
Reports of enemy casualties don’t faze you? Just this evening I was listening to an interview with an Iraqi dissident living here in the US who had finally been able to contact her family in Iraq. Her aunt had told her how the government had recently come to her house and taken all three of her sons, aged between 16 and 20, to fight in the Army. We are lucky enough to live in a country where we have an almost inexhaustible supply of choices available to us. The vast majority of the men and boys that our brave volunteers are fighting against are only given the choice of whether they’d prefer to be shot in the back or the front. That fazes me greatly.
Ken
March 26th, 2003 at 7:30 am #
“Not fazing me” refers to the disconnect that I feel over the television. A scrolling ticker doesn’t recognize that many of the people we fight are bad men. It also doesn’t convey the nasty side of regime like Saddam’s – what you say is, in many cases, quite true. You only need to look at the recent trickery where Iraqi troops, disguised as Americans, took it upon themselves to root out the deserters. It’s not that the death from both sides doesn’t bother me. It’s just that the running tallys that flash by the bottom of the screen don’t convey the emotion I expect.