Ed. note: This article was originally published in 2007 at Phillyist, the now-closed website about arts and culture in Philadelphia at which I was an associate editor. I’m republishing it here, lightly revised, for Veteran’s Day.
It’s never easy to watch friends depart for dangerous lands, but it’s comforting to know they are members of the United States Marine Corps.
That does not mean that, when my good friend, whom I met during my first year in college, when we roomed together, and who asked to remain anonymous, deployed on his first tour of duty, I was all smiles.
The sad reality is that, however well-trained, equipped and capable our soldiers are, many of our generation’s battles are fundamentally unique. Direct person-to-person combat is sometimes taken out of the equation, replaced by death squads and pockets of insurgency that blend into civilian neighborhoods, sometimes by force and sometimes with the permission of villagers.
Classic guerrilla tactics have given way to makeshift but deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs), sometimes detonated by trip wire and sometimes set off via radio remote.
When my friend returned home from about a year in Iraq, he had many stories to tell. There was, however, one in particular that illustrated the brutal moral difficulty that faces so many of our soldiers.
My friend, a native of New Jersey who attended the same Philadelphia-area university that I did, was stationed almost directly between the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in central Iraq.
For a while, he and his comrades were posted on a bridge (the one pictured above) that fed an exit ramp across the Euphrates river. This was a highway that had been in disuse since the start of the conflict and the Marines were involved in an effort to return use of the bridge to civilians in the area.
To that end, they moved their post off of the bridge to a site 500 meters away. However, in the weeks following this decision, about a dozen IEDs were placed on or below the bridge, although two ever detonated.
It is a fairly common tactic among insurgents, he told me, to send children in with these potential IEDs, usually in the form of small knapsacks or bookbags. The idea is that if the Marines don’t open fire on the child with the decoy bag, the next child will be sent in to deliver a real bomb. Some children are suckered into this or bribed, others go willingly with a terrifyingly adult devotion to their cause.
My friend was patrolling with a sniper company one day, not long after the two real bombs had gone off. The trigger man spotted a child approaching the underside of the bridge.
The sniper, following new orders the company had received in the wake of the two recently detonated IEDs, lined up a shot and took it, instantly killing the child.
Further invesigation revealed that the bag the child had been carrying was empty.
This tragic illustration of what has happened and may still happen in Iraq and Afghanistan is not the only story my friend had. There was the eight-year-old boy who approached a patrol of Iraqi army officers and US Marines, begging for water. He quickly triggered a bomb vest he had been wearing under his clothes and took the lives of five servicemen, as well as his own. There was the other young boy who drove a car bomb up to a local school, killing himself and a dozen other children.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the conversation I had with my friend about these stories was how he told them. We discussed the sad sickness of a war that involves children, but he made clear, in the field, second-guesses are dangerous luxuries.
We can only wonder, from this side of war, what these situations are doing to men and women who fight them for us. The statistics are daunting, but this is not that kind of article. Making men and women into numbers is part of the problem.
Let’s try to keep in mind, not only on Memorial or Veterans days, what exactly it means to serve your country, and that sometimes, even if someone returns physically unharmed, they may not have survived unscathed.
They do not confine their service to one or two days a year, and we must not so limit our gratitude. It is a debt we cannot repay, but we must never stop trying.
Image courtesy an anonymous friend of the author, with permission.