A BuzzFlash Reader Contribution

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The Next Wall?

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
By Ellie Remore

I just finished reading a piece in my local newspaper enumerating the reasons why civil war in Iraq is looking like a good bet. I happen to have a first husband, dead at age 27, whose name is one of the 58,000+ carved on that unspeakably sad Wall in Washington. So my immediate reaction to this news story was--who would ever have thought we'd land smack in the middle of another internecine bloodbath?

Yeah. Who'd o' thought it? Admittedly, I'm just a rapidly-aging private citizen who lacks George Bush's keen, Napoleonic eye for strategic warfare. But, Mr. Bush, if your tactics so far have managed to jockey the various parties in question into a position that all but ensures we're about to see them obliterate each other with our guys caught in the crossfire; well, uh, wouldn't this be a good time to think about ... LEAVING?? Because from where I'm sitting, it looks disconcertingly like all we're doing in that country--where we have no right to be--where all the citizenry wants from us is simply to get the hell out--is tallying up the names we'll eventually have to carve on the next Wall.

Which people can visit, and touch a hand softly, reverently, to one special space. And dry their tears and shake their heads in old grief and incessant bafflement. And persist in saying the same tediously predictable thing, over and over, year after year ... "How in God's name did we ever let this happen? Such waste, such waste." What a pity they didn't say it a whole lot louder, a whole lot sooner!

Maybe the fact that I was so personally affected by a war that has since come to be generally regarded as just a wrong-headed little glitch on the screen of history makes me hypersensitive to what surely looks to me like Bush's bad remake of it. Or maybe I just dislike the idea of carpet bombing innocent people to test out some half-baked geopolitical theory. At any rate, the number of mothers' babies currently being chewed up and spat out by Bush's Iraqi meatgrinder on any given day is now running about even with what Vietnam's was in '67. And this literally makes me want to retch. It also makes me murderously angry. And I can't help wondering if our intrepid Leader in the battle against Evildoers Who Hate Freedom has ever taken a stroll past that sorry-ass Wall. Or if it would mean anything to him if he did. If--just possibly--a fleeting ghost from his past might distantly whisper that one of them is quite enough.

Ellie Remore
Monroe, NY

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION