Memorial Day Thoughts

Mark Shields' column today is interesting.

...War demands equality of sacrifice. That is a genuine American value that has been ignored, if not repealed, in the Iraqi war, now in its third year.

All the sacrifice and all the suffering have been borne by those Americans who volunteered to serve their country and their loved ones. For all the rest of us, we have been asked to pay no price, to bear no burden.

This is the longest war in U.S. history to be fought without a military draft and without tax increases. Instead, our leadership has asked to underwrite the war by accepting three tax cuts.

...Ralph Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts, who has thought long and hard about these changes, believes our contemporary culture has devalued individual sacrifice for the common good and no longer honors our reciprocal obligations, as fellow citizens, to each other and to our nation.

This surely makes it more difficult for any leader, so inclined, to summon the nation united to sustained sacrifice.

Here is Whitehead's analysis: "Over the past generation or so, liberals in America have 'deregulated' the nation's culture while conservatives have been busy 'deregulating' the nation's economy."

...What has emerged, if we are candid, is an American society and culture where individual autonomy and self-expression are revered, where the individual's pre-eminent obligation is to himself and where the uninterrupted, private pursuit of wealth qualifies as a contribution to the common good. There is little room in this equation for sacrifice.

...By today's standards, it is quite easy to become a patriot. It involves no personal risk or sacrifice. All you have to do is to give enthusiastic, uncritical backing to the unilateral invasion and occupation of an agreed-upon unfriendly nation.

Last night our PBS station showed a repeat of Frontline's report A Company of Soldiers. Frontline spent a November of 2004 "embedded with the soldiers of the 1-8 Cavalry's Dog Company in south Baghdad to document the day-to-day realities of a life-and-death military mission that also includes rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, promoting its economic development, and building positive relations with its people." Here is a blurb from Frontline's website about the program.

Filming began three days after the Fallujah campaign was launched in November 2004. There was a surge in violence as an insurgent group, thought to have come from Ramadi, launched a series of ambushes and attacks in Dog Company's sector.

The campaign of violence began when two huge car bombs exploded at Christian churches. The unit responded immediately but found both churches sustained heavy damage. As they returned to base, they were ambushed and came under attack from gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. They fired back, forcing the insurgents to flee, but in the process a civilian was hit by a ricochet and fatally wounded.

The next day, the situation escalated further. A Dog Company patrol was ambushed and in the fighting Spc. Travis Babbitt, a gunner, was hit. Despite being mortally wounded he managed to return fire before collapsing, killing several insurgents and saving the lives of his fellow soldiers in the process.

Back at the base, patrol leader Capt. Jason Whiteley called his men together to break the news.

"Babbitt was a superb soldier, and he was a great friend to all of us, and he died like he should. He went out fighting," said Captain Whiteley. "We all loved him like a brother, and it's going to be very, very difficult for all of us, including me. But what we have to do now is be strong for the guys who are on the team, for each otherÂ…. Because later on tonight, tomorrow morning, we're going to be back on the same road, we're going to be going back into another ambush."

The loss hit the unit hard.

"I don't have a wife or kids. I don't have somebody waiting for me back home, so sometimes I wish it was me, and not Babbitt," says Private Josue Reyes, who at age 19 is the youngest member of the unit and was sent to Iraq straight from basic training.

I remember hearing Bush tell the American people following 9/11 that the best way to respond to the terrorists was to go shopping. The sacrifice of "going shopping" pales in contrast to the sacrifice that Spc. Babbit made.