Noble soldiers, ignoble wars

October 18, 11:08 AMOklahoma City Populist ExaminerDavid King

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Here's an e-mail making it's way around:

An Iowa boy

John Gebhardt works at the Cargill plant in Eddyville, Iowa. Wouldn't it be fitting if this went completely around the world! This needs to make headline news ... not some of the other junk that makes the news these days! Like the Beer Summit ... celeb weddings ... celeb funerals... who's not wearing undies etc.

If you agree, please pass this along. It's a tough, but heartwarming story with a picture of John Gebhardt in Iraq.

John Gebhardt's wife, Mindy, said that this little girl's entire family was executed. The insurgents intended to execute the little girl also, and shot her in the head ... but they failed to kill her. She was cared for in John's hospital and is healing up, but continues to cry and moan. The nurses said John is the only one who seems to calm her down, so John has spent the last four nights holding her while they both slept in that chair. The girl is coming along with her healing. He is a real Star of the war, and represents what America is trying to do.

This, my friends, is worth sharing. Go for it!! You'll never see things like this in the news. Please keep this going. Nothing will happen if you don't, but the American public needs to see pictures like this and needs to realize that what we're doing over there is making a difference. Even if it is just one little girl at a time.

I have to agree with the sentiment. How can you not? But I still wonder how much of a difference we're really making in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

And what does this mean, this making a difference phrase?  We assume it means making a good difference, based on the context.  But we know it is not always good.  Just like the change we can believe in phrase, you can deposit almost any belief  into such numinous words as difference and change.

And I wonder if we'd still be there if we had the kind of casualties we had in Vietnam. Have we really become more noble in soldiering? Or are we just getting better at "making the other poor son-of-a-#!$% die for his country", as General Patton would've said?
 

Here's an article just posted in the Daily Oklahoman about a soldier killed by a roadside bomb. So, to say the press isn't covering the nobility of our individual soldiers is wrong.

Here's an article in the Irish press about Iraqi casualties. Over 85,000 Iraqis killed between 2004 and 2008. Here are the coalition casualties.  Less than 5,000.

Maybe it's just me, but it sure seems like emphasizing stories of noble individuals over stories of actual casualties (and all their stories) has prolonged these wars. The same thing happened in Vietnam, only our casualties were so high the press could not ignore them.

So if we don't have a thousand body bags coming home every month, like we did in Vietnam, does this mean we can extend these wars indefinitely?

I am troubled by the idea that having noble individuals as soldiers somehow makes noble our war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  There's something insidiously wrong with this logic, isn't there?  By emphasizing the "means" of noble self-sacrifice, are we not justifying the ends?  Is war always justified by the noble souls involved in it?