Now Playing: The radio at a co-worker's desk
It's been a busy time.
I have completed a relocation to "Down South" from "Up North". Once again, the boxes arrived and I caught a flight out three days later. This time, though, it wasn't to the war. I was at an installation testing software and hardware for the military, making sure it would play nice among the various federal agencies and branches of service. Not surprisingly, it performed well above specifications, and I didn't have much to do.
One afternoon, though, I was walking through a break area where a television was tuned into CNN. There was a man argueing strenuously regarding the validity of the war effort. "It was built on a foundation of lies," he shouted at the camera, and presumable the members of Congress gathered around him, as this was in Washington, D.C. The man, however, was Scottish, and accused of taking money from Saddam Hussein that should have been used to feed people or run hospitals.
Is the man a reliable source? I couldn't say, for he was clearly trying to keep himself from being held responsible for his reprehensible greed. But his words, for some reason, cut me.
I went to Baghdad twice. The first time was for a few different easons. It was for the sake of the men and women fighting the war, on one level. I had the opportunity to do some things that would save a lot of lives if it worked, and it did. I went because it was important for me to model to the Poetlings that there are things in this world that are worth risking your life for, and that the fight against tyrrany is one of those, even if it is on behalf of some other country. That, too, was a success.
The second time I went was for one man. I left a buddy behind. He stayed there a year, leaving a wife and four children at home. Someone had to go so he could return home. When he got home, he still had the four children, but no longer had a marriage. I was too late, and though he tells me it was inevitable, I can't help but think that he could have made things work if I had gotten there sooner. Because of that failure, the previous success was all the more important to me.
But suppose the angry Scot is right.
Suppose the whole war was built on a foundation of lies. Improbable as it may seem, suppose the American President engineered all of the data, and got 30 other countries to go along with him, to satisfy some personal vendetta against Saddam. Even though Hussein is no angel, and I take pride in the fact that I had some involvement in his capture. But if all the fighting and occupation has been based on fabrication, then I have some responsibility for that, too. If thousands of young men and women from the Coalition countries have died fighting over something that someone made up, I am complicit to some extent, having made the effort more effective.
Will I ever know the truth? If I do, I'll never tell it here. I can only take comfort that, whether or not the reasons were valid, I kept some of those in the war from being killed. But that comfort occasionally grows cold indeed.
More to follow.