Cold Turkey

Kathryn Bigelow's film "The Hurt Locker" opens with a quote from war correspondent Chris Hedges: "War is a drug." That idea has been skittering about in my head in the days since I saw the movie. Hedges' book is entitled "War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." As I reflect back over the past week, having watched a forty-five minute refresher of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" just prior, I now have a brain full of intense, horrifying images that have outlived "news" and become "entertainment."
Why else would I have paid for my seat and a box of Junior Mints to sit in a theater and watch the story of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq? Why would I have picked a thirty-year-old film about Vietnam from a choice of hundreds of possible cable television offerings. War is a drug.
It was the rapture of being on the winning side of an election that gave me the vision of every one of our troops coming home and peace reigning out throughout the world. I believed that early talk about our troops coming home early, and imagined all those sword being beaten into plowshares, or hybrid cars. I forgot all about Afghanistan.
Even as we meander through out Iraq exit strategy, United States armed forces continue to free the world from Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Let freedom ring, if it can be heard over the sound of automatic weapons fire. "Afghanistan is very vulnerable in terms of (the) Taliban and extremists taking over again, and I don't think that threat's going to go away," according to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It has also been about thirty years since the United States was sending guns to the Taliban to aid in their fight against the Soviet Union. That was back when we were fighting a "Cold War" with the Soviets, and it seemed like a good idea. Now we're fighting them. War is a drug.
The sequence that stuck with me back in the eighties is the one that I watched on cable TV last week. Robert Duvall, as Colonel Kilgore, has just finished up his famous "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" speech, and as he hunkers down amidst the smoke and debris, he stares off into space and says with a trace of regret, "Someday this war's gonna end." True enough, but that didn't keep us from getting ourselves mixed up in another one or two since then. President Obama announced, in February 2009, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end." That will leave us with a "deteriorating situation" in Afghanistan. Imagine a world where American troops were no longer in harm's way. It's not easy. War is a drug.