A Timeline

I could not help but feel a deep pang of trepidation as the cameras panned over the student bodies at the Army-Navy game on Saturday. The word bodies cuts like the lash. Those young women and men are among our nation’s best and brightest as the phrase goes, and yet as I signify them women and men, so many of those faces were the faces of kids—college kids. So young.

If we should return to military action in the Middle East next year with much greater numbers of boots on the ground, we may have troops facing war’s violence who were born in 1998.

When we went into Iraq, our 18-year-old soldiers were born in 1985.

Into Afghanistan, our youngest soldiers were born 1983.

The first Gulf War, 1972.

Of course, not only our youngest soldiers will be killed or wounded. And not only soldiers will die.

If we return in force again, I believe we will withdraw again. And afterwards, how will Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey be so very different as nations? I hear voices calling for the US to go in and settle it—settle? Settle what into what?

Iran will no longer be Shi’a, Saudi Arabia will no longer be Sunni?

I know some young kids—infants even—some relatives, some children of friends. Will they be going back to fight over the same ground in 2033?

Without an existential threat to our nation, I cannot fathom another round of in what to me seems a war without end.

In 1983 during the Lebanese Civil War as part of a multi-national force of peacekeepers, 241 US servicemen were killed in what was referred to as the Beirut barrack bombing. Some key participants in the war included Syria and Iraq and both Christian and Muslim factions. Now over a million Syrian refugees are reported to be in Lebanon, and the situation there may be described fairly as unstable.

Some of those Americans killed in Beirut? Our babies, born in 1965.