A Lack of Faith in Wartime Hero Worship
At 1 in the morning on March 24, as the Iraq war ground through another day, I found myself sitting in the Fox News studios in New York. I was a former enlisted guy embedded among the journalists -- a color commentator during those ungodly, zero-dark-thirty hours of the war.
An hour earlier, in the green room, I had learned that Al Jazeera was showing clips from Iraqi TV: A bunch of young American GIs got lost in Nasiriyah and had been assassinated; some were kept alive, beaten and interrogated on camera.
What could I say? I had been a Marine Corps tractor-trailer driver in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the Gulf War. I knew how easy it was to get lost, how exhausted the young drivers must have been, that they probably didn't have radios or GPS units -- and if they did, the stuff probably didn't work. Three guys in our unit had been killed, dozens injured, hundreds of trucks destroyed.
So when I looked into the monitor and Fox's Washington correspondent asked me to comment on the loss of the 507th, I could say nothing more inspiring than: "You know, you're driving this truck and you can find yourself 30 or 40 or 100 miles in the wrong direction -- sometimes that wrong direction is going to be where the enemy is. That's horrible. But the story of war from Homer to now is one of horror and tragedy, so I guess we can't be too surprised
I didn't know what else to say. That was what I knew.
Col. David Hunt, who was also in the studio that night, was able to articulate a well-calibrated rage against the Iraqis. He immediately made the lost kids out to be heroes.
His story, not mine, became the accepted version.
Ultimately, Jessica Lynch, one of the missing GIs, was rescued, borne on a stretcher with an American flag draped over her body in a night-vision glow of patriotism. According to the newspapers, she had been the one to fire to her last round. She'd been shot several times doing so. She was a hero! -- just as Col. Hunt had predicted.
Except she wasn't a hero. She was a young woman from West Virginia who joined the service because she wanted to make 1,100 bucks a month and get out of town. Turned out to be a bad bargain, as she soon found herself in a very ugly place. But at least she survived, unlike her best friend, Lori Piestawa. Death in war doesn't discriminate for sex or race, reason for enlistment or patriotic values. It's meaning-free, full stop.
