Tragedy

Here at Falcon we get Mass whenever someone higher (*note: not that Higher) gets around to sending us a priest. Typically every couple of weeks. On Thursday. Supposedly there are half a dozen priests on Liberty. That’s about an eight second helicopter ride away from here. So close, so far.

This week I just happened to poke my head into the chapel about 20 minutes before an unannounced Mass was going to start. Makes it tough for people to attend when there’s no priest here regularly and no one announces when they do have one coming.

But that’s not the observation I wish to make. The priest this week came from Corps-Iraq, which is four or five levels above us, and he must be based out of the Green Zone. He asked for intentions for the Mass. I didn’t feel like speaking up at the time, but on the back of my mind was our sister battalion in another part of Baghdad that had six people killed when an IED detonated under a Bradley and flipped it over. I’m not an engineer or physicist, but I know it takes a massive explosion, and not your everyday HMMWV-disintegrating massive explosion, to flip a 33-ton vehicle. The kind of explosion that leaves a swimming-pool sized hole in the street.

The priest, who was clearly a caring and engaging man, upon not receiving any suggestions, decided to say the Mass for the folks up in the IZ because they had taken some mortars that day. Mortars hitting the IZ is an almost daily occurrence as far as I can tell, and there were no reports of any injuries that day. It occurred to me, and bothered me, that I couldn’t care less about “the folks in the IZ” when our soldiers were out in sector daily risking getting blown up.

He later interjected as the Mass went on that he just remembered that a couple of nieces of an Iraqi general had been hurt or killed in an IED blast and we could pray for them, too. Now, if I care nothing for forces and journalists and diplomats in the IZ and am more marveled than sorrowful when tragedy happens to other units out here, and sometimes barely feel anything when soldiers I don’t know from my battalion are killed, then I definitely don’t care about the distant relatives of an Iraqi general.

I used to think I had the kind of wide, encompassing heart that could feel pain for those whose lives had never even touched mine. I'm thinking of John Donne's “Any man’s death diminishes me...” but one can only allow ones self to be diminished so far. You cannot absorb the importance of the bells tolling for thee if the tolling is near continuous. At some point you must shut them out. You begin to develop degrees or layers of what suffering you will allow to concern you, and my circle of concern has been brought in so tight that even the death of my peers barely reaches me anymore. There is just too much tragedy to stop and care for it all – for even a fraction of it – and be able to carry on a normal life.

It helps, sad though it may be, that we have gotten so good at whisking the death away. Casualties are on their way to the CSH in a matter of moments. Deaths are seen only by those who are on site at the time and by the leaders who go to visit them before they are sent home. I have largely been spared those horrors, but have had conversations with the people who have had to evacuate bodies or collect remains, and those sights and smells and feelings won't go away for those people. The frequency of tragedy combined with typically not seeing the effects, makes it so much more difficult to respond with the appropriate sorrow when someone is killed.

What really concerns me is that we may be dulling the sense of tragedy of an entire generation of soldiers. (I want that impact to be broader, but such a small percentage of Americans do the fighting for the country that the impact on the future of the US will only be marginal.) Even more, though, we’re creating an entire nation of people so hardened to tragedy that they will not care for anyone’s life so long as that life was not immediately connected to their own. If there are only a dozen executed bodies found around Baghdad in a given 24 hour period, it’s a slow day. When 32 were killed at VT or 9 South Carolina firefighters die, it’s a national tragedy. Car bombs kill and wound hundreds every week. Four or five soldiers die every day here.

We’re operating in a region with a skewed sense of tragedy, and it’s no wonder that the Middle East is in the condition it is with the Arab mentality that cares only for its own, if that, and perpetuates cycles of greater and greater loss that brings that circle of concern ever tighter, caring less and less about the needs and lives of others. I feel infected by that attitude and see and hear it in my interactions with fellow soldiers. And that is worth mourning.