‘Till It’s Over Over There

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking and talking about the state of our military. Last weekend, while I was attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, I sat at dinner next to an Army officer who had returned this summer from over a year in Iraq and Kuwait, including the invasion itself. Her stories of how poorly equipped our troops were (and are) were astounding (How could you send convoys out across Iraq and through cities without road maps????), and her frustration with the current administration who sent her over there was palpable.
The latest news, today, came that a college acquaintance and a Marine lance corporal, has been activated immediately for Iraq. He had been on deck for early next year, and now he’s been told he’s leaving sooner. I covered Ruben in the days after September 11th when the specter of war first loomed. We never could have imagined then that the destination was Iraq.
He’ll be, I believe, the fifth person I personally know to go into combat in Iraq; that doesn’t count, of course, the journalists I know or have worked with who have covered the war (including Michael Kelly of the Atlantic who was killed last spring outside Baghdad). I would wager that not many of our nation’s leaders have talked