The Blair Witch War

4,000 dead. 4,000 dead. I am tempted to quote again from Smedley Butler's "War Is A Racket" (see Rosebud #198 and #199 in the January 2008 archive). But a commemoration of the dead is too sad a moment to be angry. There is only sadness. "There has never been a good war or a bad peace," said Benjamin Franklin. We feel like we are in a recurring dream, or nightmare, those of us who grew up watching the TV screen turn green with scenes of the Vietnam War. My little one will remember the dusty beige and blowing sand, the khaki camouflage. "I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in," said George McGovern. Today we are too sad to be outraged. We have marched and screamed and tried to vote the warmongerers out of office. We feel like we are in the grip of evil. "I knew it was going to be a bad day and a half," wrote Jerry Ryen King, a soldier in Iraq, in a journal entry dated March 7, 2007, a month before he became cannon fodder. (See the cover of today's New York Times.) "The next day," he wrote, "we cleared an area that made me feel as if I were in Vietnam..."