David Botti
|
Feb 12, 2008 02:02 PM
The fifth anniversary of the start of our war in Iraq is a little
more than a month away. There will be retrospectives looking back to
those early days of shock and awe, in addition to news analysis and the
nation's self-reflection. Even a month out from the anniversary,
conversations about the upcoming day seem to revolve around the same
theme: "can you believe it's already been five years?" It is a
sobering thought. And even if you believe in the war, or are staunchly
at odds with its premise, five years is a unit of time to view not so
much in length, but in the various phases that occurred.
The summer of 2003, as I saw it, was a honeymoon period. The
optimism for Iraq's future still ran high (at least in some circles),
and at the same time I could see questionable expressions on the faces
of Iraq's citizens as we patrolled past them. No one knew how it would
all play out. Personally the fragile tensions that held together a
shaky peace ended on November 12, when a suicide bomber destroyed the building in An Nasiriyah that at one time was my platoon's headquarters.
Homecoming
was also different. There were no VA scandals, or talk of PTSD, or
advocacy groups comprised of Iraq veterans. We simply came home and
quickly immersed ourselves back into civilian life. To watch how that
has changed is to examine the evolution of the war in Iraq and on the
home front. To ask a veteran about his or her experiences in Iraq
yields not an overall glimpse into the war, but an occasion to see just
one phase of it. This is what needs to be remembered as the anniversary
coverage begins. I remember seeing soldiers entering Iraq July 2003 and
feeling bad for them. They'd missed the defining war of our generation.
They would spend a few months in post-invasion mopping up, and go home
on the tail end of the operation. Of course, the irony in this cannot
be overstated.
We have enough perspective over five years to
eschew generic "looks back" for a more nuanced analysis of how our
country has fared over this time. It must be broken into phases: the
invasion, the time surrounding 2004's battle for Fallujah, the grinding
years of 2005 and 2006, the Abu Ghraib and Haditha investigations, and
the controversial surge plan that's brought us to this point. At home
the fascination with the invasion's pyrotechnics has given way to
simply reading of the daily casualty figures ticking away over the news
wires. There's also the trends in media coverage to consider, the
heightened focus of home front veterans issues, and how artistic
mediums have sought to portray the war and inform us.
Looking
back on the fifth anniversary means not so much seeing what happened,
but understanding how we got to where we are today, and how driven we
are to look at Iraq not simply as a war, but as a series of distinct
eras.
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