By Vincent Bugliosi
My anger over the war in Iraq, some will say, is palpable in the pages of
this book. If I sound too angry for some, what should I be greatly angry about — that a
referee gave what I thought was a bad call to my hometown football, basketball,
or baseball team, and it may have cost them the game? I don't think so.
Virtually all of us cling desperately to life, either because of our
love of life and/ or our fear of death. I'm told there is a passage in a novel
by Dostoyevsky in which a character in the story exclaims, "If I were condemned
to live on a rock, chained to a rock in the lashing sea, and all around me were
ice and gales and storm, I would still want to live. Oh God, just to live, live, live!"
So nothing is as
important in life as life and death. We fear and loathe the thought of our own
death, even if it's a peaceful one after we've outlived the normal longevity. We
fear not only the loss of our own lives, but the lives of our parents and
sisters and brothers, as well as our relatives and close friends. We don't think
of our children too much in this regard because our children, in the normal
scheme of things, are supposed to outlive us. When they die before us, the
already hideous nature of death becomes unbearable. And that's when they die a
normal and peaceful death from illness. If the death is from an accident, like a
car collision, the death of the child, if possible, is even more unbearable.
So one can hardly imagine the gut-tearing pain and horror when the only
child of a couple, a nineteen-year-old son, call him Tim, the center of his
parents' lives, whom they showered with their love and lived through vicariously
in his triumphs on the athletic field and in the classroom, and who was excited
as he looked forward to life, planning to wed his high school sweetheart and go
on to become a police officer (or lawyer, doctor, engineer, etc.) dies the most
horrible of deaths from a roadside bomb in a far-off country, and comes home in
a metal box, * his body so shattered that his parents are cautioned by the
military not to open it because what is inside ("our Timmy") is "unviewable."
(To make the point hit home more with you, can you imagine if it was your son who was killed in Iraq and came home
"unviewable" in a box? Yes, your son Scott, or Paul, or Michael, or Ronnie,
Todd, Peter, Marty, Sean, or Bobby.)
No words can capture the feelings,
the enormous suffering, of Tim's parents. But I think we can say that among a
host of other deep agonies, they will have nightmares for the rest of their
lives over the horrifying image of their boy the moment he lost his life on a
desolate road in Iraq. As a mother of a soldier who died in Iraq wrote in a May
17, 2004, letter to the New York Times:
"The explosion that killed my son in Baghdad will go on in our lives forever."
She went on to say that "seared on" her soul are the "screams and despair" of her family over the
loss of her son and the "sound of taps above the weeping crowd at the grave site
of my son."
Just as Tim's young life ended before he really had a chance
to live, so did the lives of thousands of other young men in the Iraq war. Not
one of them wanted to die. As one wrote in his diary before he was killed in the
battle of Fallouja: "I am not so much scared as I am very afraid of the unknown.
If I don't get to write again, I would say I died too early. I haven't done
enough in my life. I haven't gotten to experience enough. Though I hope I
haven't gone in vain." In letter after letter home by young men who were later
killed in combat in Iraq were words to the effect, "I can't wait to get back
home and to start my life again."
All of the young men who died horrible
and violent deaths in Bush's war had dreams. Bush saw to it that none of them
would ever come true. It is impossible to adequately describe all the emotions
and the magnitude of the human suffering that this dreadful war has wrought. But
we can at least begin to comprehend the enormity of it by looking briefly at
some stories of those young men who paid with their lives for Bush's monumental
crime.
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