Friday, November 3, 2006

Who are our troops anyway?

Ezra Klein, who is really gathering steam as a thoughtful blogger, has a gutsy post today after a few days of thinking about L'Affaire Kerry -- the joke John Kerry seemed to make about the education level of American soldiers in Iraq. (For the record, I'm still not sure that's what he meant. That he was making a joke about the Administration seems plausible enough to me.)

But Klein takes seriously the question of troop education level, and in general the demographic profile of the men and women who are over there representing the country. Klein risks the backlash against frank talk about soldiers to say that we don't do the troops, or the debate about the war, any favors if we "dreamily speak of the great sacrifice, magnificent courage, inspiring intellect, and extraordinary characters of our troops. It's ... designed to make us feel better, so we don't have to face what we've done to these children, and don't have to imagine the toll a warzone takes on real humans, rather than imagined supermen." I think it's worth quoting a bit more:

I had a friend who ended up a biohazard unit during the early days of the invasion. He's an amazing person: gentle, empathic, wise, and courageous. He went to a top college and enlisted after 9/11. He's precisely the soldier we like to describe. But he spent his days terrified, waiting for calls back home, waiting for his tour to close. He performed his duties well and displayed enormous personal strength, but he was just a kid, and his expression of patriotism had landed him in hell.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:52 AM

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