On this first anniversary of President Bush's Iraq war, I cannot get out of my mind the photo that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on Dec. 30. It showed a young man sitting on a chair facing a class of sixth graders in Blairsville, Pa. Next to him was a woman. Not the teacher of the class, but the young fellow's mother. She was there to help him because he is blind.
That was Jeremy Feldbusch, 24 years old, a sergeant in the Army Rangers, who was guarding a dam along the Euphrates River on April 3 when a shell exploded 100 feet away and shrapnel tore into his face. When he came out of a coma in an Army Medical Center five weeks later, he could not see.
Two weeks later, he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, but he still could not see. His father, sitting at his bedside, said: "Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing." The newspapers on Dec. 30 reported that 477 American GIs had died in the war. Today that number has climbed to more than 550. And the number of seriously wounded now exceeds 2,500.
But the term "seriously wounded" does not begin to convey the horror. Sergeant Feldbusch's mother, Charlene Feldbusch, who, along with his father, virtually lived at his bedside for two months, one day saw a young woman soldier crawling past her in the corridor. She had no legs, and her 3-year-old son was trailing behind. She started to cry, the Times reported.
Later she told the paper, "Do you know how many times I walked up and down those hallways and saw those people without arms or legs and thought: Why couldn't this be my son? Why his eyes?"
The president was eager to send young men and women half a world away into the heart of another nation. And even though they have fearsome weapons, they are still vulnerable to guerrilla attacks that have left so many of them blinded and crippled. Is this not the ultimate betrayal of our young by our government?
Their families very often understand this before their sons and daughters do, and remonstrate with them before they go off. Ruth Aitken did so with her son, an Army captain, who insisted he was protecting the country from terrorists. He was killed on April 4, in a battle around Baghdad airport. "He was doing his job," his mother said. "But it makes me mad that this whole war was sold to the American public and to the soldiers as something it wasn't."
One father, in Escondido, Calif., Fernando Suarez del Solar, told reporters that his son, a lance corporal in the Marines, had died for "Bush's oil." Another father in Baltimore, whose son, Kendall Waters-Bey, a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps, was killed, held up a photo of his son for the news cameras and said: "President Bush, you took my only son away from me."
They and their families are not the only ones betrayed. The Iraqi people, promised freedom from tyranny, saw their country, already devastated by two wars and 12 years of sanctions, attacked by the most powerful military machine in history. The Pentagon proudly announced a campaign of "shock and awe," which left 10,000 or more Iraqi men, women and children dead, and many thousands more maimed. As for Jeremy Feldbusch, his hometown of Blairsville— an old coal-mining town of 3,600—held a parade for him, and the mayor honored him.
I thought of the blinded, armless, legless soldier in Dalton Trumbo's novel "Johnny Got His Gun," who, lying on his hospital cot, unable to speak or hear, remembers when his hometown gave him a send-off with speeches about fighting for liberty and democracy. He finally learns how to communicate, by tapping Morse code letters with his head, and asks the authorities to take him to schoolrooms everywhere, to show the children what war is like.
But they do not respond. "In one terrible moment he saw the whole thing," Trumbo writes. "They wanted only to forget him." In a sense, the novel was asking, and now the returned veterans are asking, that we don't forget.