The Hardest Part

I was watching my son last night.

He's 11 years old, going on six. It's probably the last summer I'll be able to say that; little boys seem to go through a little last grab at childhood before they begin the slide into adolescence.

And it scares me. This war started before my son was born. And I'm afraid it won't be over for a very long time, especially if the weasels and defeatists and pacifiers have their way.

I'm the dad. I'm supposed to take care of this stuff.

I've said it before. I'm sure I'll say it again; the Cold War ended about the time my daughter - the older of my kids by 18 months - was born. I remember watching the Wall fall; I remember holding my little girl as I watched Strategic Air Command end its forty years of alert; thinking "that's that" when they started uprooting the Minuteman silos around my hometown.

Of course, the peace even then was illusory; the roadmap leading to 9/11 seems to clear in retrospect. The mission now seems just as clear - to paraphrase Tom Skeritt's sergeant in Saving Private Ryan, "the only way home is over the bloody bodies of every Islamofascist who feels death is preferable to civilized coexistence.

Reading Belmont Club the other day was enlightening - in a profoundly depressing way. Wars like this never get any less brutal and barbaric:

posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely. The fraternization of that first December so alarmed the generals that "special precautions were taken during the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, even to the extent of actually stepping up artillery bombardments" to prevent its recurrence.

The brass didn't have to worry: it was never to be repeated. After the Somme in the following year, infantrymen on both sides filed saw-teeth into their bayonets to make the thrusts more painful. The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all.

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory.

Victory. It's really the only option. I'm not saying that in any jingoistic sense at all; I'm saying it because the idea of defeat, of caving in to what the enemy represents, is too noxious to stomach.

And yet as implacable as our enemy is, there's at least a fair chance that the job of finishing the war will fall to kids my son's age.

Gawd.

I watched him playing "Gundam" on the computer tonight, his still baby-smooth face glowing from the monitor, alert little gray eyes dissecting the problem with that joyfull fierceness that little boys bring to games. No.

I'm the dad. I'm supposed to take are of this shit.

I'm the one who's supposed to go stuff the monsters back under the bed. I'm the one who's supposed to beat the bad guys down, to teach them manners.

I'm the one who's supposed to protect him. I'm the one that's supposed to blow big holes in anyone that tries to harm him.

And that's just what I want to do.

But I'm 41, I have a blown-up knee, one bad eye, and two kids to watch, and while in my heart there is not a snake-eating killing machine on earth who has anything on me when mine are threatened, in reality I doubt I'd fool any recruiters.

And it kills me. Keeping my family safe is my job.

And it scares me stiff to think that it will someday be his instead.

So what do you tell your kids? "The best we can hope for is that we stay committed to winning this thing. The worst we can expect is if this nation goes insane and elects a vacuous hamster like John Kerry, which will prolong the war into your childrens' lifetime."

God, this is hard.

Posted by Mitch at May 10, 2004 05:52 AM