The U.S. Team vs. The Other Guys

When I was a kid, I would ask my dad to tell me stories about being in the army. He never served in combat, but he'd participated in training counterinsurgents in Panama, some of which was associated with what would eventually be known as the School of the Americas. He would explain tactics; some of which he learned in the service, but most of which I'm sure he learned from any number of historical authors recounting famous battles from Waterloo to Hamburger Hill.

I would always refer to the opposing forces as teams, as in, "Dad, what team won?" He would always correct me, and say grimly, "They aren't teams. They are armies." I didn't really catch on until I was much older and started reading books about war on my own.

I remember reading Ghost Soldiers a few years ago. It's a book about the prisoners at Camp Cabanatuan in the Phillipines and the Army Rangers who liberated them. The prisoners were survivors of the Bataan Death March, and they were dying under the brutal at worst and severely neglectful at best treatment of the Japanese Army...not the Japanese team.

I wonder sometimes if a lot of people detached from the realities of war have started to think of it as teams playing...rather than human beings killing. Those caskets landing in Delaware are points for the other guys. Hussein dangling from a rope filmed by an observer with a cell phone was like a big three-pointer or punt runback for us.

Its sick.

This "sport" is taking lives, and the ones that it doesn't take are scarred. And sometimes, rather than resting on a bench and getting ready to go back in, these players off themselves. The most recent report I can find is from May of this year. "The U.S. Army reported Thursday tht the suicide rate among its soldiers continued to rise last year, and is now nearly double the rate recorded before the invasion of Iraq." In 2007, the Army confirmed 115 active-duty soldiers committed suicide...19 per 100,000 soldiers...three quarters of whom had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. In 2002, it was less than 10 per 100,000 soldiers.

This team isn't doing a very good job of promoting morale, is it? I think the coach needs to think of some new half-time motivator in the locker room.

Killing people just isn't the energizer the movies make it out to be. Who'd have thunk it?

"Dad, tell me when the game is over."