Bob Herbert: The emotional black hole that grieving families experience when losing loved ones in Iraq.
Bob Herbert is writing about the emotional black hole that many military families are experiencing as a result of the loss of their loved ones in Iraq. The grief experienced is astounding and senseless, made even worse when you consider the fact that Bush and the right-wingers cannot explain the noble cause for which their children died. The moral decay of those who think they have risen above good and evil is astounding; it is completely astonishing who Bush and the right-wingers fail to take human suffering into account.
Tomorrow, Herbert tells the story of Paul Schroeder, a father whose son was killed in Iraq and who, like Sheehan, wonders what the Noble Cause is that our men and women in uniform have died for. And Bush is guilty of moral cowardice because he refuses to face up to the consequences of his actions. Instead, he sent two of his aides to meet with Sheehan. That is like a Dungeons and Dragons game where the 6th-level Wizard makes his apprentices go into a hole to see if there are any orcs there instead of seeing for himself if there is any danger.
Every morning, when Mr. Shroeder awakens, he feels normal for the first 5 or 10 seconds. And then it dawns on him that his son, Augie - Lance Cpl. Edward August Shroeder II - is no longer around. Then an awful sadness descends, like a black curtain, over the rest of the day.
Corporal Shroeder, 23, was one of 14 marines killed last August in a roadside explosion in Haditha, in western Iraq. Just two days earlier, six marines from the same reserve unit - the Ohio-based Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment - had been killed in an ambush.
"When you have one or two guys get killed, it's back by the truss ads," said Mr. Shroeder. "It's not on the front page. But when you have 20 killed from the same unit in the space of 48 hours, that's big news."
That is exactly the problem -- one soldier is too many for a war in which there is no just cause. The hope of the Bush administration is that we will become desensitized by the deaths of just one or two soldiers. It used to be big news whenever a soldier was killed; now, it is relegated to the back pages of the news. But no amount of propaganda or attacks on people's patriotism will bring these people back from the dead.
Mr. Shroeder (pronounced SHRAE-der) and his wife, Rosemary Palmer, who live in Cleveland, and who are facing the Christmas season with eyes swollen and raw from crying, believe enough is enough. They have gone public with their view that the war has been wasteful and foolish and not worth the lives lost.
"We have to come up with a plan to get us out of there," said Mr. Shroeder. "What we're saying is that we need a serious debate about all options to end this. We cannot have the open-ended, ongoing, stay-the-course thing, because it's killing people."
Mr. Shroeder said he and his wife are not calling for an immediate withdrawal, "just willy-nilly," of American troops. But they believe it is essential that a workable plan for an orderly withdrawal be developed - and developed quickly - because the present policy, reaffirmed by President Bush in his speech at Annapolis last week, "is not working."
Bush is already showing signs of caving in. He has already developed plans to begin the drawdown of US troops behind the scenes even as he continues to bluster about staying the course. But we cannot let up on our criticisms of him; what if he just plans to reduce our troop levels to 75,000 in the hopes that our presence will generate less coverage?
In Mr. Shroeder's view, President Bush's war policies have been both tragic and futile. "Staying the course," he said, is like continuing to pour water into a hole in the sand at the beach, "a process that gets you nowhere."
"My son told us two weeks before he died that he felt the war was not worth it," Mr. Shroeder said. "His complaint was about having to go back repeatedly into the same towns, to sweep the same insurgents, or other insurgents, out of these same towns without being able to hold them, secure them. It just was not working, and that's what he wanted to get across."
Mr. Shroeder dismissed the idea that criticism of the administration and the war was evidence of a lack of support for the men and women fighting in Iraq. "You can support the troops and be critical of the policy that put them there," he said.
Another way to put it would be to compare it to banging your head against a brick wall, which is exactly what Bush has been doing. That is not a militarily sound way of doing things. But these are the tactics the Bush administration adopts in order to "prove" to the American people that the Iraq war is producing results.
A direct consequence of George Bush's misguided war.
And furthermore, our soldiers are starting to see that the Iraq War is just a waste:
He took issue with the public officials who insist that his son died for a "noble cause," however comforting that might be to believe. On the contrary, he feels that Augie's life "was wasted."
Recalling his last conversation with his son, Mr. Schroeder said, "I asked him, 'Do you feel like you're protecting your family and other Americans back here?' And he said, 'No. Not at all.' "
He said Augie felt that he was not accomplishing anything. "He thought it was a waste."
So, if a growing number of soldiers are refusing to buy into George Bush's misguided war, this simply shows that his campaign boasts about being able to provide the leadership that Clinton lacked were broken promises and empty boasts that were totally devoid of substance. In other words, all spin and no deliverance.
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