When the faces of the American dead click by at the end of the News Hour on PBS, I force myself to watch. In the instant they appear, I note the age and hometown of each one, and if something in the person’s gaze catches my eye, I may wonder fleetingly what led them to enlist or what kind of death they suffered. Then there’s another face to consider, and another. I’ve been doing this for eight years now; it’s routine. In my mind’s eye, there’s now a parade of young men and women, many just out of high school, others who have remained in service to our country into their maturity.

Will it ever end?

Follow up:

The casualties continue to pile up: more than 4,000 Americans in Iraq now, 1,598 in Afghanistan. But of course these numbers do not tell the whole story. At the end of 2006, the British medical journal Lancet estimated that the total loss of life due to war had already passed 600,000, and in 2007, a survey of Iraqi families by Opinion Research Business estimated over one million Iraqi violent deaths. I was unable to find more recent statistics.

Earlier this month, the New York Times published a story about Samar Hassan, a striking 11 year old whose parents were killed by American forces as they drove from their home in Tal Afar, Iraq, to take her little brother to a hospital because he was ill. Samar, who was 5 at the time, was photographed by Chris Hondros as she wept inconsolably. Her life and her brother’s go on among a compound of four families who still see them grieve. Hondros, who took the photograph while embedded with American troops, was invited to leave, and he later died while photographing fighting in Libya.

For those of us who have never experienced combat, photographs often bridge that gap between text and understanding. The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert documents in photographs and drawings a 1986 trip into Afghanistan (under Soviet siege then) by the photographer Didier Lefeuvre with Doctors without Borders. In a New York Times review, Chris Hedges writes,

"The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like Lefeuvre, are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? How do you cope with memories of children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?"

By some accounts, American troops will be out of Iraq by the end of this year, but as of now we have 50,000 troops there. The undignified execution of Saddam Hussein remains a stain, I believe, on our claims of justice delivered. Osama bin Laden has been captured and assassinated (in Pakistan, but that’s another story), and the pressure mounts for us to leave Afghanistan where Operation Enduring Freedom engages troops from 28 countries. Last week, the House of Representatives voted on an amendment to withdraw from Afghanistan which missed passage by a mere 11 votes. That amendment has been turned into a separate bill that even has limited Republican support.

But as a clamor for freedom that we did not anticipate has swept across the Arab world, we are again tempted to use military might to influence events, as witness our participation in NATO’s actions in Libya.

Now that we have no draft and the economy has soured, the people who fight our wars may be grateful for the job. They may see their service as career enhancing rather than an interruption of their lives. It may be the only way they can finance an education or put food in their children’s mouths. Or it may be a way to prove their patriotism and earn citizenship. Especially because they are not of a privileged class, we owe them the dignity of not wasting their lives.

And on this Memorial Day let’s remember that there will be no war without tears.