North Star Writers Group

Steven Spielberg’s and Tom Hanks’s Band of Brothers may be one of the most believable accounts ever rendered of the exploits of US soldiers in World War II. Almost all 10 episodes begin with reflections of soldiers who were actually in the 101^st Airborne, which is the company of soldiers the audience follows. Within the story, we see soldiers who are traumatized, dismembered, sleazy, confused, conflicted, but above all, courageous, brave and unbelievably resilient.

I love watching it because, despite the obvious humanity of the characters, the crusade itself was noble, it was one of salvation, and US soldiers were the saviors. The world was faced with a powerful force influenced by a man turned completely evil. He had to be stopped, so the Allies banded together and stopped him.

One might suggest that an utterly horrible situation of genocide and the murders of millions of minorities is, despite its ugliness, somewhat clean in its ugliness. By clean, I mean simple, but I prefer the word clean because, when we consider history, or even history in the making, we always prefer to see a picture that is the opposite of messy. The cleaner it is, the better we are able to understand it. We would like to understand it well enough that we could describe it almost perfectly if we wanted to, which we often do. Messy pictures, on the other hand, are harder to understand, recount, talk about or sleep on. They are replete with conflict, indecision, uncertainty and, consequently, frustration. In general, I think most of us would rather watch movies about WWII than Vietnam or Iraq, because in WWII, the enemy was palpably evil, and the Americans were, not only on the winning side, but they were the good guys.

However, nothing, no matter how seemingly evil a man may be, is ever as simple as we’d like. Could the Allies have acted sooner? How many millions more could have been saved? Were the issues that delayed the US from getting to Europe financial ones? I once heard that Hitler offered to send all the Jews to America as an alternative to killing them, and we rejected them. Hopefully there is little truth to this, and I rather doubt there is, but how can we know for sure? Did we really need to take the extraordinary step of dropping two bombs on Japan? We simply can’t know for sure.

Now the US is in the midst of a conflict in Iraq where nothing seems certain, or has seemed certain for years. It epitomizes messy, the opposite of clean.

The only certainty of war is a death toll. By at least one estimate, 2,853 US troops have died. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died, according to recent estimates. And only God knows how many terrorists have died.

Unfortunately, we cannot comfortably say, “Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and obvious ties to Al Qaeda,” because we just don’t know. From the outset, there was at least some consequential degree of support for the invasion of Iraq. But in hindsight, the majority has come to intensely question the wary. In hindsight, maybe US leaders were wrong. Maybe we should have stayed out. But how could we possibly know for sure when there is so much information that we, as American citizens, do not have?

I have come to believe that, in paintings of war, the only way a person can make a death toll manageably clean is to, first, identify the painter and second, either justify or renounce him. It is too unbearable to sit and watch as thousand upon thousands of people die, while wondering if their deaths served any real purpose.

But to those on both sides of the issue, perhaps we need reminding that George W. Bush is not the only one making decisions, and we ought not to make it our solemn purpose to decide whether or not we agree with his foreign policy. He is a man with a lot of power, and he is also a spokesman for those around him. He is not a dictator.

Perhaps we also need reminding that we can’t be sure if our intelligence really did fail, or if those who cited it as a reason for action had ulterior motives. There is a lot we don’t know.

And perhaps the most important reminder of all is to say that we can’t know. In terms of American foreign policy, it is our job to ask questions, ensuring our leaders that we are concerned, careful observers. As we lead our lives and watch the rising death toll, we have a responsibility to ask whether or not our countrymen, and our fellow human beings are dying for some purpose. But it is not within our reasonable capacity to claim to understand this situation better than our leaders.

Those who think they fully understand the situation, whether they brazenly support the war or renounce it with every fiber they have, are not as concerned with the truth as they are with making an undeniably messy situation clean.

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