Chitwood: Remember whose life’s on the line

One Memorial Day about 10 years ago at the Fort Michell National Cemetery, the heat was so sweltering it was hard to tell who was crying and who just had sweat in their eyes.

That changed after the ceremony, when I asked a World War II veteran about the wars then ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. He turned away, took off his cap, and wiped his face.

When he turned back, his eyes still were wet.

He recalled that people back home didn’t take a soldier’s service in World War II for granted. Everyone either was in it or intimately knew someone who was. The war was on everyone’s mind.

Sixty years later, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were more of a sound bite for a news break. Most people didn’t seem to care. Their minds were consumed with daily trivialities, a Seinfeldian obsession with minor inconveniences, petty annoyance, baseball scores and celebrity gossip.

War to them was a distant prospect, or what they imagined to be an overseas adventure depicted in action movies and video games. A few scattered reports of American casualties didn’t alter that.

Some were even cocky about it, cavalierly boasting of America’s military prowess, as long as their lives weren’t on the line, nor anyone’s they knew.

The old veteran’s remarks reminded me of an earlier time — back to 1991, when another George Bush went to war with Iraq.

The heated rhetoric came not just from politicians, but from average people talking smack, like they personally were going to Baghdad to kick Saddam Hussein’s butt, even though Bush wasn’t going that far.

One night I was out in a bar, as usual, and saw a table of soldiers sitting right in front of an overhead TV tuned to CNN, and drinking remarkably slowly for guys out on the town. They were silent as they stared at the screen.

As one passed on the way to the restroom, I tried to sound cheerful: “Hey! How’s it going?” I said.

He didn’t smile. “Just trying to stay alive,” he replied.

War was not theoretical to those guys. They knew it was coming, and they knew they were going. They just didn’t know whether they’d be coming back.

Twenty-five years before that, when I was a kid, Vietnam was on the evening news — the only time we had TV news, in the 1960s and ’70s, absent some news flash like an assassination. You rarely see them now, but back then images of dead enemy bodies often filled the screen, as victory was measured by body count.

It seemed more people took it personally then, maybe because of the draft, or because Americans so passionately were against the war or for it.

Or because more of the soldiers in dark green Army uniforms were guys we knew — uncles, cousins, or young men who grew up down the street.

Even if you were just a kid with a full-size G.I. Joe to act out a scene from “The Green Berets,” war was not a game. Sometimes it reminded you of someone you knew, and never would see again.

No wonder a flippant or indifferent attitude toward sending men and women into battle seems warped to an aging veteran. It takes soldiers’ lives for granted.

“Boots on the ground” aren’t pieces on a board or images on a screen. They’re brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers and mothers.

Whether we know them personally or not, we need to remember that.

This story was originally published May 29, 2016 at 2:34 PM with the headline "Chitwood: Remember whose life’s on the line."