A Different Face of War
A National Guard Company just arrived home from Iraq (pronounced Eye-Rack locally) here in Brookings last week. A parade was held on Main street in celebration of the day. Stores around town painted their windows with welcome signs. Flags were hung on light posts and other convenient locations - the streets were awash with American pride.
A local dealership donated Ford and Dodge pickups that carried the returned soldiers, National Guard 727th Transportation Company, Brookings, SD. As I looked through the window with my other captive coworkers, I noticed that these weren't the hapless teenagers we watched in Vietnam War movies in the 80s, they were grown men with families and often children riding in the back of the trucks with them. Neither were they front line platoon warriors; the drove trucks and supplied the troops pressing forward in the campaign. People lined the streets clapping and cheering them as they passed. Signs were painted as a big welcome.
A big misconception I had about South Dakota was the people's connection to the outside world. I assumed that people here were too remote to feel the effects of outside world; in a place where California seems so remote, how much more would a different country? What interest could a person here have in foreign politics and warfare; this is a place where so many people never actually see an ocean, not because it's so impossible but because it's travel and travel is not so automatic a thing.
As I watched truck after truck go by it solidified something I had come to understand in the last year of being here: so many of the people enlisted to fight in these foreign wars and implement American foreign policy come from places like this1 - small towns where the blue collar folk bequeath service in the armed forces the way political office is passed through generations in Washington DC. They wear their service with pride, stand during anthems with hands upon their hearts and fly the red, white and blue on their well kept lawns.
The irony is this: with so high a price they pay in service it is still difficult to find a conversation about the rational, science, politics and motives of war. Once at lunch I asked a group of people what their thoughts were on WMD, Bush and Iraq (I pronounce EE-rack). A person physically moved away from the question. Make up your mind and keep your mouth shut. We don't know what They know in the White House. We inherited service, pride and sacrifice, not eternal political discussions of why, right, wrong - we leave that inheritance to the children of Washington DC. Go get 'em GW, Al Gore and company.
1Not forgetting the fact that so many Marines are based in California and something like half the US Armed Forces is from Texas.
11:08:53 PM 
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