Chance
As I was browsing the website of my hometown newspaper (gjsentinel.com if you want to see what life is like in Western Colorado...), I came a across a headline about HBO making a movie about one of my classmates from high school. His name is Chance Phelps and he joined the Marines just after he graduated. He was sent to Iraq and was mortally wounded in March 2004, less than a year after we had graduated. Chance only attended my high school for our final year, so I didn't really know him well. He played on my school's football team(American football...) and I remember him being a pretty funny guy. We definitely were not friends but we had a class together and exchanged a few words.
The night that I heard that he had been killed, my university's ice hockey team had just won the national championships, so the whole campus had gone crazy, and I'm pretty sure I had been running and jumping through the corridors of the halls I lived in, along with others. I had called my mom to share the victory with her (she had been watching the game with some people who she teaches with). She was excited with me and then told me that Chance had died. I remember feeling so selfish. Here I was celebrating the victory of some stupid game being played by people whom I didn't really know, without a care in the world. Here he was dead because he was fighing for a cause he really believed in; debatably dying so that I could run around like an idiot in my safe little university world celebrating disgustingly trivial things. Chance's death brought the war home for me. It doesn't consume my every thought, but I do think of him, and others I know who are still fighting, with some amount of frequency.
I don't like war. I don't think anyone really does, but it goes on nonetheless. It is so easy for us to be removed from it. I wonder if President Bush would have made similar choices if his daughters were in the military or the children of close friends. This war is so controversial-- suspicion of alterior motives, the apparent lack of evidence of WMD (how awful is it that this acronym is now understood in daily, civil vernacular?!), alegations of torture and other war crimes, the often-parodied 'axis of evil.' Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, the public does not know the full story, so it is hard for us to accurately judge these events. It is difficult to judge whether lives are being lost for a noble purpose or to satisfy greed. I hope and pray that they are not lost in vain.
Father, let good come of this ugly, dirty thing called war.
The night that I heard that he had been killed, my university's ice hockey team had just won the national championships, so the whole campus had gone crazy, and I'm pretty sure I had been running and jumping through the corridors of the halls I lived in, along with others. I had called my mom to share the victory with her (she had been watching the game with some people who she teaches with). She was excited with me and then told me that Chance had died. I remember feeling so selfish. Here I was celebrating the victory of some stupid game being played by people whom I didn't really know, without a care in the world. Here he was dead because he was fighing for a cause he really believed in; debatably dying so that I could run around like an idiot in my safe little university world celebrating disgustingly trivial things. Chance's death brought the war home for me. It doesn't consume my every thought, but I do think of him, and others I know who are still fighting, with some amount of frequency.
I don't like war. I don't think anyone really does, but it goes on nonetheless. It is so easy for us to be removed from it. I wonder if President Bush would have made similar choices if his daughters were in the military or the children of close friends. This war is so controversial-- suspicion of alterior motives, the apparent lack of evidence of WMD (how awful is it that this acronym is now understood in daily, civil vernacular?!), alegations of torture and other war crimes, the often-parodied 'axis of evil.' Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, the public does not know the full story, so it is hard for us to accurately judge these events. It is difficult to judge whether lives are being lost for a noble purpose or to satisfy greed. I hope and pray that they are not lost in vain.
Father, let good come of this ugly, dirty thing called war.
posted by Diana at 5:31 AM
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