A Schoolmate Buys It In Iraq

The BBQ Pit
1

Even though it was a small school, I didn’t know him all that well, as he wasn’t in the group I hung out with. His sister was in my graduating class, and I knew her fairly well, though I haven’t spoken to her since graduation.

An absolutely senseless waste of his life, IMHO. Not serving in the military, but getting killed in a bullshit war that was started for bullshit reasons, by our brain dead President. WTF was Shrub thinking when he started this damned war? Did he honestly believe that Saddam had WMDs? Or was he just high on his own power and think that he could get away with it?

Another friend of mine survived 3 tours of Iraq and is now getting out of the Marines because he doesn’t want to risk a fourth tour. Said it’s too rough on the wife and kids and “it’s not worth it.”

The town we grew up in was, at the time, a small, sparse little farming community. Total population was less than 5,000 people and after my senior year, Les Wexner, owner of The Limited clothing stores began buying up the town and transforming it into one of the wealthiest subdivisions in the state. The locals tried to fight him, but he and his cronies, quite literally, bought the entire goddamn town government so that they could bulldoze whatever they wanted. Not only did they destroy the sense of community that was there, but they wiped out (or tried to wipe out) the few historic buildings in the town.

The golf course that they built ruined nearly everyone’s well (no city water all), so the people were forced to accept city water from Columbus at an exorbitant cost. When he found some residents wouldn’t sell their homes, he had their property taxes jacked up until they were forced to sell because they couldn’t afford the taxes.

Shawn, the schoolmate who died, was one of the few people around my age who could remember what the town was like before Wexner took it over. One of the few who knew what it was like to read Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer and know that despite the cars, electricity, and modern medicine, the place he lived in was not so different than that Mark Twain wrote about. Now, that memory of what was New Albany, what we all felt, thought, hoped and dreamed about has been dimmed. And for what? For fucking what? Democracy? Iraq doesn’t have it. To protect the US? Iraq was never a threat to us. Cheap oil? Hah!

If there is an afterlife, I hope that Shrub has to endure being beaten senseless by Shawn and all the others who’ve died in Iraq.

Shawn’s obit, for anyone who’s interested. Rest well, Shawn.

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I’m sorry Tucker, for you and his loved ones. It always feels infinitely worse when it hits (relatively even) close to home. My condolences and agreement on the senlessness of it. Fuck this unnecessary war.

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I am sorry to hear about your classmate. What a terrible waste.

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Wow. Way to exploit a person’s death. You didn’t even really know the guy. You haven’t spoken to HIS SISTER since graduation? How long ago was that, if he was 35?

Attack Bush all you want. He deserves it. But, using this kind of ammo cheapens Captain English’s death…meaning he died for more than just to provide you with the subject of a message board post.

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Quite frankly, there’s no way I could possibly cheapen his death any more than Bush has done. Period. Paragraph.

No, he wasn’t a close friend of mine, no, I haven’t had any contact with him or his relatives since I graduated high school, but that doesn’t mean I can’t regret the loss of his life. I did know hm, did pick on him at band camp, and did talk to him at times. His death puts a bit of a personal stamp on the war for me since it’s now claimed the life of someone I’ve met. I’d be just as pissed off if someone whom I’d only encountered on this message board died in Iraq for this clusterfuck. Does it make me a bad person? Better he be mourned by someone who barely knew him than to be mourned by none at all, don’t you think? Or should I only be upset when it’s a close friend of mine who dies?

You’re a “guest” here, so you don’t know anything about me. You don’t know that I reported a former employer of mine (while I was still working there) to the Feds for knowingly shipping shoddy goods to the military. You don’t know that this has cost me a friendship. You don’t know that I can trace my family’s service to this country back to the Revolutionary War (one of my great-great-great grandfather’s hung out with a fellow by the name of Thomas Jefferson). In short, you don’t know jack shit about me, and yet, you somehow feel more qualified to judge me than I’m qualified to mourn the loss of someone I knew during my formative years. Why is that?

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Because I wouldn’t use what I don’t know about you as a message board post. I read your post and thought that not only is is shitty that this poor guy died, but he has someone who doesn’t know him ranting on the internet about his death.

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Did I claim to know him well? No. Did I say that he and I were best buds in school? No. Did I claim that he was a great father? No. I made no effort to deceive anyone as to how close Shawn and I were. And this makes me a bad person? What a fucked up world you live in. I suppose you must really hate those anti-war folks who rant about the deaths of soldiers and Iraqis they’ve never met.

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And that’s wrong because why exactly? Just because it’s not something you’d do, doesn’t mean you’re therefore holding the opinion of the rest of humanity. One would think that would be obvious.

To Tucker: You don’t have to defend or explain yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling, or sharing, how much you’ve been effected by something that’s happened to someone else. The attitude of “only if it’s in my backyard” is just one of the things that end up damaging humans in general. The world would be a better place if we all cared about more than just ourselves.

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I’m with Tucker on this one. Gallatin is in a lot of ways, very like the town I live in. I don’t see anything wrong with Tuck being angsty about one of “theirs” lost in this stupid war.

FWIW, lola, our oldest son ships out to Falujiah in Janurary. I’m proud of him for choosing the Marine Corps as a career, but at the same time I’m petrified because no body with any sense is piloting the Ship of State.

And, upon preview, I don’t think you know Tucker very well. Or Tennessee very well, for that matter.

10

The best time for outrage was the moment it was cogently argued that the rationale for war was a lie. The best moment being past, better late than never. Each and every death is a crime.

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Never said you were a bad person, only that you were exploiting the death of a person you don’t know to make a post on a message board. FWIW, I oppose the war.

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Could you please explain how exactly, just by posting on an internet message board, that what he did was exploitive? I’m sorry, but I’m just not quite grasping your specific reasoning here.

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You, however, are teetering dangerously close to representing yourself as a bad person. Only an asshole of the first grade would dare question a stranger’s angst about the death of an acquaintance.

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Yeah, how dare people give concrete examples of precisely why they are against the war.

I’m against the war pretty much only because people die and get maimed in it. If I actually demonstrate examples of this I’m “exploiting” them?

If I’m for AIDS or cancer research, it it exploitative for me to provide examples of people who died of these diseases?

Sounds like you bought into some pro-war idiot’s attempt to deflect valid criticism.

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What a tool you are. So what’s the cutoff, lolatoo? Can I bitch about the war if my buddy dies? I haven’t talked to him in eight months. Of course, he’s been in Iraq for eight months, does that matter? What if I haven’t talked to someone in a year? Is that OK then? 366 days? Where’s the line? I wouldn’t want to run afoul of a moron like you by bitching about someone’s death past the acceptable time.

Tool.

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It wasn’t going to be one of his kids, so why would he care?

-Joe

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I wonder what would happen if everybody who helped bring about a war would then have the same chance of survival as those who had to fight it.

For example, if there was ten percent chance of a soldier getting killed, then when the war is over ten percent of the people who pushed for the war get a bullet in the head. Maybe add a few percentage points to factor in civilian deaths too somehow.

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Oooh, Revtim, that’s such a good question! Have a lottery of all in Congress who vote in favor of the war. What an intriguing notion. But arrange it before they take the vote..

Tucker, I hear you. Having it happen to someone who walks in your footsteps makes it ride your back even more. His death is absolutely unnecessary. It is contrived. I serves an ego that is out of control.

(And thank you from this English teacher for understanding that we are like the characters of great literature regardless of the time. You have made my day!)

Bring them home.

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lolatoo, I know what you’re talking about–in fact, there are numerous instances on this board and others where a poster will start a thread discussing a tragedy that is tangential to them (they hardly knew the person or family involved), and their anguished post seems an all-too transparent effort to get sympathy and attention.

But sometimes it’s a tragedy befalling a familiar name, face, or place, or that involves someone who shared an experience with you (like a common high school) that makes a remote event feel a lot more real and close to the heart. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly fit that description, IMHO–they seem pretty remote to a lot of people. We’re not growing “victory gardens” or buying war bonds; most of us may never hear from someone personally who has been there. Wars seem like something for another time, another era. I find that troubling (even though I suffer from the same delusion). I think that remoteness makes it a pretty big shock to hear that a person real to you, someone you knew or knew of, has died in these conflicts. It can be a jolt even if that person wasn’t close to you. Pondering that, I cut Tuckerfan some slack in this regard, moreso that I would someone posting about their mother’s coworker’s niece being in some auto accident.

I mean, holy shit, we’re at war–we’re actually sending young people off to die in ways you wouldn’t think still happened in this day and age, and much of the time the public is almost blase about it. I wouldn’t wish more deaths on our troops, nor to have more families, friends, and acquaintances suffer such terrible news. But sometimes I do wish we’d all wake up a little more to the reality of it–so I tend to take messages such as Tuckerfans with some sincerity.

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Awful. I’m really sorry to hear about it. I have many friends in various branches of the military, some of them in Iraq, and every time I walk past a newspaper machine I hope that I’m not looking at one of their faces on the front page.