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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear Visionaries,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>A friend shared this Washington Post column with
me. I did not watch the HBO program mentioned here but I did hear an interview
on NPR with the producer of "Last Letters" which I could not sit through without
tears. Read on:</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV>
<P><B><U><FONT face=Helvetica,Arial size=2>washingtonpost.com</B>
</U></FONT></P><B><FONT size=5>
<P>Our Collateral Damage</B></FONT> </P><FONT size=2>
<P>By Richard Cohen<BR><BR>Thursday, November 11, 2004; Page A37 </P></FONT>
<P>If you watch HBO's "Last Letters Home" -- and you should -- keep an eye on a
particular father of a slain soldier and listen hard. The other parents, wives,
girlfriends, boyfriends, friends and siblings are occasionally eloquent, always
moving and always sad, but this one father is starkly different. He says
nothing. His wife talks; he doesn't. The war in Iraq has taken his son and that,
really, is all there is to say. Thousands of miles from Iraq, this father is
what we call collateral damage.</P>
<P>I was reminded of "Johnny Got His Gun," Dalton Trumbo's 1939 novel about a
World War I soldier who comes back horribly disfigured and mute. In the father's
case, though, the muteness is unrelated to physical injury. Nothing was done to
the body, but his silence testifies to a searing pain -- contained, bottled up,
metastasizing, none of it leaking out, none of it shared -- a man, coping (not
coping?) with the death of his best friend, his silliest dreams, his best
memories, his life beyond the one granted him. His silence will break your
heart.</P>
<P>During the Vietnam War, Trumbo's book was often cited as the ultimate antiwar
novel or, depending on your politics, a clever and pernicious piece of antiwar
propaganda. But all truth about war is anti. It is anti because it is horrible.
It is anti because it is about waste. It is anti because it reveals loss and
sadness and pain and injury and death. It is anti because time often turns the
reason for the war ephemeral or downright silly -- out of frame, if life were a
movie. Only one weight is placed on the scale. The truth about violent death
obliterates the truth about everything else.</P>
<P>Second Lt. Leonard M. Cowherd was killed May 16, 2004. He was 22. He was also
a West Point graduate, so if you are looking for some way to mitigate the
tragedy, that could be it. He chose the military. Of course he did not want to
be killed, but he was a college graduate and a smart guy, and he understood the
risks. In this, he was like a police officer or a firefighter -- something like
that. They, too, understand the risks. So when something happens -- a building
catches fire or some killer is cornered -- we pay people to do the dangerous
work that we won't do ourselves. Is this more or less what we did in Iraq?</P>
<P>Maybe. Certainly, those who favored the war -- who palpably wanted it -- must
have thought so. They must have seen it as necessary, and it may have helped
that most of them -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the rest -- had
never been in combat themselves, although plenty of those who had were in total
agreement. Maybe it helps, too, to believe that the dead go to heaven, and so
the end as I see it is not the end as they see it. Still, there is something
awfully cold and mean about sending young people to die for what amounts to a
geopolitical theory about the Middle East. Sorry, send your own kid for
that.</P>
<P>It helps above all to think of war as a grand cause and not just an
unspeakable horror -- and to never get too close to the victims, in this case
the parents or lovers or siblings of those who were killed. The film, which
premieres today, Veterans Day, and will be available to most cable households,
breaks that membrane. The loved ones read from some of the last letters home.
None of them say a word about the war itself -- about whether they favor it or
oppose it or have any position at all. They simply face the camera, hold a
letter in their hands and conjure up a vanished life.</P>
<P>Some of the soldiers were very proud of what they were doing, some were
intensely patriotic and one, somehow, had sensed his death just over the
horizon. He wrote his goodbyes. But without mentioning a thing about politics,
without a word about the virtue of the war itself, the cause -- what is it,
exactly? -- diminishes, shrinks, and we are left staring at a man who cannot
speak or will not speak and so we want to do the talking for him. We want to
tell him why his son died, why it mattered so, and we cannot. His is the
muteness of pain. Ours is the muteness of shame. </P>
<P><I><U><FONT color=#0000ff>cohenr@washpost.com</I></U></FONT> </P>
<P align=center>© 2004 The Washington Post Company </P></DIV></BODY></HTML>