While I'm On the Subject

While I'm on the topic of Iraq, not to mention America's worldclass ability to wage indiscriminate, myopic wars . . . maybe what needs to be remembered most is that we're still us.

We didn't lose in Vietnam. We weren't there to lose. By every conventional military standard, we won. Yet we fled. We fled from our own creation, when we could no longer deny its horror and its ugliness. And we fled from ourselves, when we realized that what we'd fallen in love with was a monster of our own creation, an unintended monster, but a monster nonetheless. And how fitting it is that, when we face the marble of The Wall, we see our faces reflected on the names.

We won't lose in Iraq. We won't be there to lose. And someday, when the time comes to design the Iraq Memorial, I'd hope for a fountain, a fountain and a pool, in front of The Wall.

So we can see them reflected there, too.