Doing Our Part?
by Dennis Vanvick
Web extra, posted March 17, 2008
American troops are shipping out, presumably into Iraq. A middle-aged woman leads about 100 of them out from a corridor feeding into the huge, sunlit atrium of the Atlanta Airport. She is waving a small stars and stripes and has a USO banner draped over her shoulder. The troops are young, fit, and dressed in fatigues.
We passengers lounge about in the sun on chairs and sofas, like walruses on vinyl rocks. Scattered around us is the clutter of things we use to kill time--laptops, paperbacks, Starbucks cups, and cardboard containers from one of the fast-food restaurants lining the inside of the circular atrium. The food is overwhelmingly rich in calories and poor in vitamins, each bite stealthily and incrementally beefing up the Body Mass Index. Fruit intake is limited to the Blackberries and Apples some of us habitually plug into.
Applause begins as the troops reach the center, first a smattering and then a rippling through the entire atrium. Some cheer and whistle with their arms in the air as if we are watching football players filing into a stadium, ready to start the game. Of course, this is not a game and this venue is no more appropriate for sports metaphors than the deck of an aircraft carrier.
There are some tight smiles from the troops as they pass but most are expressionless, somber. We passengers live in the same country and pledge allegiance to the same flag, yet a glance around the atrium reveals sharp contrasts. On average, we are older, whiter, and probably from a different socio-economic class.
A black female soldier says something behind her hand to the black male soldier walking beside her. He tilts back his head to laugh uproariously, the only soldier showing any appreciable degree of animation. I wish I could hear what she said.
These young troops will soon board a plane to take them to a foreign country to risk their disrupted lives in a civil war enabled by their own government for reasons that were at best ill-defined and at worst disingenuous. One wonders if their definition of success in Iraq matches that of the politicians. Nullifying the insurgents and installing a shaky democracy in Iraq seems to be the best-case scenario from the political perspective, but getting back home alive might be the best metric from a soldier's viewpoint. After four-thousand coalition lives, 100,000 Iraqi lives, and a half-trillion dollars, "success" now seems an obscene misnomer, no matter what the criteria.
When the last of the troop exits the atrium, and the applause dwindles away, we passengers resume our trivial battle with waiting. We fight only boredom, we kill only time. Some passengers return to their books and burgers, while others plug back into their gadgets. Many are expressionless, solemn like the soldiers. The middle-aged man next to me--one of those who was cheering wildly--is smiling contentedly now, perhaps trusting that our team will win the big game and that he has done his part for our country today.
Dennis Vanvick is a formerly self-employed techie. Now retired, he winters among the seven million inhabitants of Bogota, Colombia and summers amongst the flora and fauna of Northwest Wisconsin. He can be contacted at vanvikd@hotmail.com.