Why?

One day I was taking out the garbage. As usual, I had the baby on my hip. My neighbor, John, was driving down the alley, and stopped to say hello. I asked him if it would be okay to put him down as a reference on my National Guard application.

This leads to a pair of obvious questions, "why would you want to join the Army, especially these days," and "Do you believe in the War in Iraq?"

I found it easy to answer the questions glibly and move on. I said "I need to get out of the house and do something useful," and "no." He suggested I join a political campaign or greenpeace or something. John had things to do, and the baby was licking the side-view mirror on his truck, so we parted.

Why would I want to join the Army, especially "these days?"

Do I believe in the war?

These are difficult questions, and frankly, that's what this Blog is all about. My intended readers are my wife and my mom, and they deserve to know. I talk a lot about my thoughts and feeelings, beliefs, things I learn, understandings of the news, stuff like that. But here's where it's supposed to come together in some kind of linear manner.


These Days:

We are a nation at war. Or something like that. Other than the price of gas, the occasional fragment of news, and "support our troops magnets" on the backs of cars, one would hardly know it.

We have soldiers abroad, in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are at war. Our nation, as a whole, is at peace. Driving down the road, going shopping, going to work and school still continues unaffected. The average citizen is unaffected.

We, meaning the Nation, were attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001. But that was in New York, and on the Pentagon. How does that attack me? I can invoke the rule of Me-To-ism, saying it affected me because I saw it on TV, or it affected me because my stepbrother was in the Pentagon that day. Or I can decide that the attack was on me, as I am an American, and 9/11 was an attack on America in general. Me-to-ism.

Five years later, we have not been attacked again on American soil. Military forces were sent to Afghaninstan to topple the Taliban regime, disrupt al Qaida's operations, and, theoretically, to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Then, for some damn reason, we invaded Iraq, toppled Saddam Hussein, and sent a barely functional nation over the edge of chaos.

We were told that Iraq was about preempting terrorists from gaining Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and preempting Saddam from using nuclear weapons.

Iraq, is seems, had none of those.

What are the threats against the American people today? The price of gas went up to over three dollars a gallon, and has come back down. American servicemen have been sent to go meet the terrorists. Some say, that's to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

Hogwash. Nineteen men took over four airplanes, and some people think that was impossible for a bunch of dumb arabs, so it must be a "conspiracy." Other people seem to think that what they did was easy enough that it could happen again. In the interest of keeping the American people safe, little old ladies have to take off their shoes at airport security, and nobody can carry scissors or Leatherman tools on board anymore. And now it's shampoo that's forbidden.

Who is the enemy we fight? Why are we fighting them? What do they want? How do their wants threaten us?