Doing the Right Thing
Recently NPR aired a profile of a young marine who was killed in Iraq. This has been a regular feature of NPR's these past few years and I will confess, with some guilt, that I often turn the sound down until the story is over. Listening to the friends and families of fallen soldiers just fills me with anger, and what they really need is someone to share in their grief. So I usually don't listen.
But this time I did, and I was quickly reminded of the other reason that I stopped listening to these stories. The mother of the young man explained that he had decided to enlist right after 9/11 "because he felt he just had to do something." His high school teacher added that "He was always trying to help others. You just knew he would do the right thing."
More than 3,000 young men and women have died in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and thousands more have been permanently scarred by the wars. All were volunteers, and for many 9/11 was the reason they enlisted. Because of that attack on America and the loss of so many innocent lives, a wave of young Americans were inspired to do their duty, go in harm's way, serve and protect, kill the enemy, do the right thing.
I guess most Americans feel a stirring combination of pride and appreciation when they hear such stories. I feel a depressing mix of fear and doom. Here's why:
Post-9/11 we consider it noble to track down and kill those responsible. We accept that in the process we will also take many entirely innocent lives. The price of war, we say, the blame lies with the terrorists for attacking us.
Once we accept that the events of 9/11 totally justify that thousands of young Americans enlist into the armed forces, train in methods of death and destruction, develop hatred for certain nationalities, races, religions, and/or ethnic groups, and then fly off to some other land where they can serve us by inflicting death and destruction on them, including, inevitably, the murder of obscene numbers of innocents and the mass demolition of civilian infrastructure, then we have assured, and justified, the next attacks on us.
Why is this so hard for Americans to understand? The people of Afghanistan and Iraq have suffered through an unending string of 9/11s inflicted for the most part by Americans and other outsiders. Should we just assume that their young men and women are so cowardly and ignoble that they won't do the right thing?
Consider that most of the Americans who were inspired to fight by the events of 9/11 did not live in New York City or Washington DC and did not personally know any of the people murdered that day. It didn't matter — just the fact that it happened to their country was enough reason to fly off to war.
There are few Afghani or Iraqi teenagers today who have not personally experienced extreme loss caused by American actions. We can assume that more than a few will feel inspired to do the right thing. It only took twenty to do 9/11.