The war at home

On the first night of the war, I struggled to listen to reports from Iraq amid the intermittent cries of my daughter. It was a first for her, too -- her first cold.

This was a human disruption of an inhuman event. I wanted to keep my eyes glued to the television as video of the first airstrike was rolling. But Mira would have none of it. She wanted my attention, and didn't care what was happening in Baghdad.

Television has made war look so clean, antiseptic, game-like. You see the flashes light up the nightscope-green sky, and it looks just like fireworks.

These are anti-aircraft shells exploding, each one a small explosive charge that sends out a shower of fragments capable of destroying an airplane and the pilot inside. Each little light, capable of death. But on television, it looked just like a light show.

Mira wasn't impressed. She wanted to go for a walk around the house, for someone to hold her and help her breathe a little better through her congested nose.

Coming back to the news, a reporter talked about the 2,000 pound "bunker-buster" bombs dropped by American stealth fighter-bombers, and how they may have "taken out" some top Iraqi leaders.

Now the words were matching the sanitized nature of the images on television. By "taken out," he meant killed -- dead -- men who will never to come home again to their wives and children. Some may be deserving of this fate for crimes against their fellow man, while others might be innocent people just walking down the street when their world ended.

Make no mistake, people die in wartime. They aren't "taken out," they are killed, the result of lead and steel propelled by gunpowder and high explosive, desecrating the bodies of human beings.

War may be an inevitable part of civilization on this planet. We may never realize total peace in our time, or the time of our grandchildren's grandchildren. We may have been forced into this war by the actions of others for whom humanity is an empty term.

But making it look like a video game hides the real truth. Our "troops" are not just pieces of military hardware. They are someone's sons and daughters who may never see their homes and families again, never be able to wipe the nose of a sick little girl like Mira, who doesn't know what war is.

Undoubtedly, there will be children in Iraq who will pay the ultimate price for a war they don't understand, either.

It is an ugly fact of war that innocent people die. Dead civilians will be classified as "collateral damage," regrettable casualties in this attempt to give them a better life. So sorry.

War may be unavoidable in the our world, but that doesn't make it desirable. Armed conflict is the failure of people to find ways to resolve their disputes without killing each other.

It has been portrayed as glorious, in the stories and movies of the great wars past. For certain, there is a different dynamic among people who are put under the extreme stress of combat, and this creates a bond between soldiers that is indescribable.

After the first Gulf War, I remember sitting on a plane next to a young tank commander who was homeward bound. He was excited to tell me the stories of what they did over there in the desert. I was eager to hear the tales, just as I had listened with fascination to the war stories of my uncles when I was a boy.

This young soldier told how his tank engaged enemy targets, and the excitement and confusion that reigned. He brought out pictures he took while he was there. One photo was of a body burned into an unrecognizable form. He was smiling excitedly while showing this image to me, perhaps the first civilian to see it.

When he saw the look on my face, his smile disappeared. "That is pretty bad, isn't it?" Just like television, this young man had disconnected that image with the human life that was sacrificed to create it.

Perhaps the comment about someone being "taken out" by the bunker-buster might not have connected with me if it weren't for that little girl in my arms. She forces me to realize that many parents out there -- both Iraqis and Americans -- will never see their children come home.

War really is hell.

Kirk Caraway, a Carson City resident, is editor of the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza in Incline Village.