America’s finest

Gordon Meriwether
Published: August 20, 2008

As our Olympic athletes collect the medals in Beijing and are proclaimed America’s finest, I can’t help but compare their place in our society with that of our young people fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are similarities: Both volunteered for their assignments, both are young, both are in great physical shape, both are trained to a level of expertise that only few can imagine, both are paid a meager salary for their work and both represent our nation to the world.

The similarities end there.

While our returning athletes are admired and pampered with glory and recognition, our soldiers are soon forgotten. On the cover of USA Today on Aug. 13 the competing headlines read “2012 is Next Goal for Phelps” compared with “Soldiers: Rooms Infested by Mold.”

For a country at war, these visible inequities are staggering. The Olympic athletes come home to the joys of continued careers, athletic or otherwise, and the love and admiration of their family and friends. The military comes home for a few short months with their families before they are ordered back into harm’s way.

Combat tours are repeated and enlistments are extended while the rest of the country counts the days until college football starts or the American Idol season finale. Somehow having a volunteer Army seems to justify our indifference, as if to say, “This is what they signed up for.”

But Mr. Bush’s war is not someone else’s war; it’s our war. As much as I disagreed with the reasons for being there and the way we were misled into war, today we are there and the future of our nation is at stake.

The present cost of the war in lives, money and our reputation is overwhelming. But the future cost of the war will be even greater and borne by our children, their children and their children’s children. The longer the war goes on, the more devastating it will be on future generations.

We do seem to worry about the war, but not to the level of inconveniencing our lifestyles. It’s almost as if the war is one of those “he said, she said” reality TV shows on a cable channel we don’t get or prefer not to watch. Vietnam was different. It came into our living rooms every night with all the gore, agony and chaos that is war.

Then there was the draft.

I was drafted in 1970 after a four-year college deferment. No. 113 in the lottery, my number was called in March 1970. We were all part of the Vietnam War. We had a stake in its outcome. We all knew friends over there or knew those who didn’t come back. It was part of who we were. It was personal, and that was one reason it ended.

While Mr. Bush’s war is a nuisance for most of the nation, the families of the young who are fighting it suffer each day, each hour and each minute in dreaded fear of that official knock at the door.

I know I speak for the other veterans in our community when I say that war is not an inconvenience. This is not a video game rated Mature. Our young people are dying for what they believe. They are dying so Mr. Phelps can win eight gold medals.

Every time you see one of our young athletes standing proudly on the podium, remember the young soldier shivering in the desert night on watch to protect his buddies. Remember the Navy corpsmen attached to a Marine rifle squad on patrol, saving lives while under fire. Remember the airman working 12-hour shifts in the desert to keep the aircraft in the air. Remember the families that wait at home.

Remember and pray that all our heroes come home safely and soon. They are making it possible for the all of us to enjoy the riches of our way of life.

Gordon Meriwether is an independent columnist who lives in Culpeper. He appears every other Thursday in the Star-Exponent. E-mail