On September 11, 2004, my son deployed to the Anbar province of Iraq with his Marine Corps unit, the 3rd Battalion 5th Marine, and over the next month, the Marines and army soldiers amassed outside of the insurgent-infested city of Fallujah, where American citizens had been shot, dragged through the city, set on fire, dismembered, and hanged from a bridge the Marines had taken to calling, "Blackwater Bridge," after the private contracting firm that had employed the murdered men.

We did not know it then, but it was the job of the 3/5 to retake that bridge and move on deep into the city, cleaning out buildings of enemy fighters street by street, house by house, room by room.  We did not know that it would be the biggest battle the Marine Corps had seen since Khe Sanh, or the bloodiest, or that many would not be coming home.

However, most of us family members had a pretty good idea, based mostly on scuttlebutt, that there was to be a massive battle to retake the city, and that our loved ones would be in the thick of it.  And every last one of us left behind knew what that meant, because even if we hadn't wanted to think about it, the reality of war had forced us to.

Before my son deployed, he had sat down with me and discussed funeral arrangements should "anything happen to me," and had told me how he wanted his modest possessions parceled out to buddies and his sister and his dad and me. 

When we hugged him good-bye at the airport, I had tried my very best not to break down; I wanted to be at least as brave as he was, but the tears came anyway, even though I tried to hide them from him.

After embracing us both twice, he squared his shoulders, hoisted his sea-bag, and strode toward the escalator that would take him through security where we could no longer go post 9-11.  His dad and I stood, clutching one another, watching him walk away, and when he reached the top of the escalator, he turned, faced us, and gave a huge wave and a big smile.

It was the bravest thing I ever saw him do.

We forced smiles and waved back, turned and headed for the parking lot, and the minute we stepped outside the building, we both broke down sobbing--even his six-foot-four combat-vet dad.  I continued to cry for the entire two-hour drive home.

I have never in my life been more terrified. 

You just have no way of knowing if that is the last time you will look upon your child's smiling face or feel the fierceness of his hug.  There is no way to describe this to anyone who has not experienced it.  It is an unrelenting trauma that lasts throughout the deployment period.  Every phone call, every letter could be your last, and you never forget this, not ever, even as you watch news reports and hear the daily body count of dead Marines and soldiers, even as you grieve for those other parents you do not know, even as you get that midnight phone call and hear the utter exhaustion and sadness in his voice and hear him say, "I'm all right.  We lost three guys, but I'm okay."

My son came home in one piece from that deployment, only to go through it again the next year.  His cousin deployed three times to Iraq with the Marines--all combat assignments--and another of his active-duty military cousins is in Iraq now, as we speak, with the army, also in a combat detachment.

I love my country, and I love my military family.  I would not have married into this family of warriors if that were not so.  Almost every male member of my family, on both sides, has been to war many years ago or just recently or is there now.  Those who are still active duty are either fighting a war or training to fight one. 

War is the family business.

And this is exactly why I am suspicious of patriotism.

You have to understand what I mean when I say that, and the easiest way to understand it is to check out the Roget's Thesaurus listing under the word, patriot:

"arm-waver...flag-waver, good citizen...hundred-percenter, loyalist, nationalist, partisan...patrioteer...volunteer."

You can check out the entire list yourself, here: 

http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/patriot

There is only one antonym listed, and it is clear and unequivocal:

"traitor"

There don't seem to be any antonyms for "patriotism," except, further down the page, one:

"treachery"

In the run-up to the Iraq War, with all the media-dazzle of muscular graphics and powerful rhetoric, complete with politicians throwing around terms like "mushroom cloud"  and "weapons of MASS DESTRUCTION" with ominous menace, it became fashionable to confuse the war itself with the warriors who would be fighting it.

If you did not support Bush's War "one-hundred percent," then, basically, you were a traitor.

You did not--horror of horrors!--"support the troops."

But when you are looking at it from the military point of view, you know that, constitutionally, the United States military cannot declare war on anyone.

George Washington himself, as well as a loud chorus of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, were very very wary of the unseemly love of kings to invade countries in order to expand their empires, and to conscript hapless citizens into their armies to do it for them.

Consequently, they put a civilian in charge of the United States military.  And they gave the power to declare war to the Congress of elected representatives.  They didn't trust that power to one ruler.  It was too dangerous, the consequences far too grave.

The U.S. military is the finest in the world--of that, there is no question or debate--and they stand ready to obey the orders of their commander-in-chief whenever and wherever he or she sends them.

Many, many men and women in uniform had grave doubts about this war they were being asked to fight--if not in May of 2003, when Bush declared "major combat operations" over and complete--then definitely by the time my son first deployed in 2004.

But the onslaught of pro-war propaganda had taken hold by then, and anyone who dared question what we were doing over there was attacked as being unpatriotic--even if he or she had served in a war themselves.

During that time, I received many, many well-intentioned e-mails from "patriots" who lacerated in the most rage-ful and hate-filled language imaginable those who publicly questioned the war or its civilian leadership.  There was a presidential campaign going on by then, and battle lines were drawn by those who supposedly "supported the troops"--those who didn't, were traitors, period.

They didn't realize, of course, that I was one of many who questioned just what the hell we were doing over there, and why.  They just assumed, based on my family's proud military history, that we all supported the war "one-hundred percent."

As a combat mom, when I did express my doubts to anyone, I was told repeatedly by well-meaning souls that if I said, did, or even THOUGHT anything that was opposed to the war effort, that I was, in effect, hurting not just "the troops," but MY OWN SON.

This was so agonizing to me that, desperate for some help, I looked up Colonel David Hackworth, who was, at the time, the most-decorated combat veteran in the entire United States.  His service in Vietnam was legendary.

I found him with a Google-search, and poured out my heart, begging the question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO LOVE THE WARRIOR AND HATE THE WAR?

He answered me almost immediately, sending me all sorts of online links to organizations of soldiers and Marines who were either currently deployed or had been, who questioned the war the loudest because they could see for themselves what was going on there.

"Honest to God we look at this situation in exactly the same way," he said.

To my great and abiding sadness, "Hack," as he preferred to be called, lost the only battle of his life, to cancer, a few short months later, but I cherished his support and his wisdom through my son's first deployment and will always be grateful to him for it.

The idea of romanticizing war and its warriors is as old as Homer, of course, but according to one of the finest books I've ever read, which I fully expect to see receive the Pulitzer Prize this year, THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING, Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, it was the American Civil War that first saw the country-wide development of something called the "Good Death," regarding those lost in war.

Until that war, no one had ever seen such carnage and such unimaginable loss.  Approximately 620,000 men lost their lives during those four years.  If you were to figure it proportionately according to population, that would be the equivalent of SIX MILLION American dead in four years of war.

Dr. Faust spent ten years researching the impact of this kind of horrendous cost to this country.  Using the most careful scholarship, she studied thousands of diaries and newspaper accounts and records that were kept, first haphazardly and then with great care.  When tens of thousands of men die in a single battle, the ability of those officers still alive to catalogue those deaths was simply too overwhelming for most of them to manage.  When possible, friendly soldiers were put in shallow graves, but that was not always possible.  Enemy soldiers were left to rot.

Back then there was no system put in effect, either, for notifying families.  Sometimes a buddy would write to notify loved ones, but sometimes, they just never heard from their son or husband again and were left to wonder.  Usually, they would have to travel to the battlefield and step over and around the bodies, searching for a familiar face.

Embalming was basically created in order to provide a means to get the body home on a train without the worst repercussions, but even then, only families with money could arrange such a thing.  Most just never saw their loved ones again.

The magnitude of suffering soon became more than even churches could possibly explain or even cope with--there was simply no way to reconcile religious belief in a benevolent and loving God with this kind of horror, especially when both sides of the conflict were Christian and were praying to the same God.

Various ministers began to preach sermons and print them up in pamphlet form that attempted to make sense of the insensible.  The Christian idea of redemption was translated into a transcendent death of patriotic sacrifice: 

"Soldiers suffered and died so that a nation--be it the Union or the Confederacy--might live...Death was not loss, but both the instrument and substance of victory."

Gilpin shrewdly points out that those who wrote so passionately about "patriotic sacrifice" (or, in the 21st century, "noble sacrifice")--had not, themselves, fought in the War or watched the horror and terror of death up-close.

She mentions a great Civil War warrior, Ambrose Bierce, who fought bravely for the Union army for four years before himself being seriously wounded.  After the war, Bierce wrote some of the most powerful fictional and nonfictional narratives ever written--certainly up to that time--that joined the war literature of such future writers as Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway.

His detail was gruesome and stark and absolutely unromanticized or glamorized or sanitized, as so much war literature is.  He described, for instance, a bullet-wound to the head of a soldier, "above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings"--even as the man yet lived.

Gilpin astutely points out:

"The yawning discrepancy between the hopes that inaugurated the war and the experience of its horrors deeply affected Bierce's subsequent view of the world.  Surviving the war left him tormented by "phantoms of that blood-stained period" and by a bitterness that derived not just from his own loss of innocence in war but from his sense that he was among the few truly to admit war's terror and its price.  He felt both isolated and angered by the denial and repression of loss that characterized the postwar world."

Yet another fine book draws a distinction between the macho and glamorized talk of war and patriotism, and the reality felt by those who actually must do the fighting:  SOLDIER'S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point.

The author, Elizabeth D. Samet, has been teaching literature at West Point for the past ten years--before 9-11, and through six years of fighting in Afghanistan and five years in Iraq.  Many of her former students have gone on to fight in both wars, and they write to her and visit when they are home.  They tell her what they learned from her class on the literature of war, what books they took with them overseas, how they applied what they'd learned in their own combat situations, how it sustained them, and how the trappings of patriotism really affect them.

She quotes that great war writer, Ernest Hemingway, in his book, Farewell to Arms, when his Lieutenant Henry comments,

"Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

Like, say, Fallujah.  Or, Blackwater Bridge.

Samet points out that greatest of truths--that soldiers and Marines do not like to be called "heroes."

Just today, an Iraq vet named Sean Gilfillan blogged for HuffingtonPost.com:

"Unless you've been there, don't put out a song about war or the service members. It is much too complicated. You either miss the entire point or make it seem like a movie. We never want to go to war and we fight purely out of an instinct to protect the men and women we serve with. The overwhelming emotions are not what they are commonly portrayed as and NOT every service member that goes over to Iraq and Afghanistan is a hero! A hero is someone who jumps on a grenade or pulls his buddies from a sure death or jumps out and saves innocent civilians from being killed. That is a hero. I am not a hero. I went to Iraq with my unit, went out and interacted with Iraqis every single day and did what I thought was right. Period. "

You can read his entire post here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-gilfillan/attention-entertainment-i_b_94978.html

Samet makes the very shrewd and wise point that the public and media celebrations of soldiers and Marines who've been to war as heroes actually has a dehumanizing effect.

"Such sentimentality has a dehumanizing effect; it is not the same thing as true sympathetic accord.  Soldiers have become assuaging symbols of sacrifice; they allow us at once to feel and not to feel that we are at war; to go shopping, as we have been encouraged to do, in cars adorned with flags and bumper stickers and comparable emblems of sacrifice by proxy."

What this does, she says, is "it celebrates the abstraction of the military's sacrifice."

I remember my son telling me once that he found "all the gushing" to be embarrassing; it made him uncomfortable.  "I just did my job," he said, "what the taxpayers paid me to do."

I remember once, he called his Vietnam-vet dad from Camp Pendleton and said, "I wish the president or SOMEBODY would just step up, come out, and say, 'Look, we're really really sorry for the way we treated the Vietnam vets when they came home.'  Then maybe everybody would leave me alone."

He truly believed that a lot of the "gushing" he saw--much of it, again, from those who had not themselves served, or whose own children would not be fighting the war--was guilt for the past bloodstained legacy of the Vietnam war, and, as Samet pointed out, relief, in a way, that only less than one-half of one-percent of the nation's population would actually be called upon to make that sacrifice themselves.

Much easier, really, to rave about flag lapel pins, insisting that they represent true patriotism, when actually, they have nothing to do with it.

In my view, you have not earned the right to call yourself a true patriot until you, yourself have either stepped up to serve your country, or until you have hugged your child or loved one at an airport, sent them off to war, and wondered if you would ever see them again.

If this country truly believed all its patriotic mish-mash, it would not hide its face from the war-dead.

Ever since Dick Cheney put the policy into practice, way back when he was defense secretary for George H.W. Bush, the airplanes disgorging flag-draped caskets have been hidden from public view.  In the early years of the war, you could get fired just for photographing them.

In fact, when Ted Koppell held a Nightline vigil on the death of the first one-thousand men and women in Iraq, he did so by flashing a photograph of each and every face, coupled with their names, ranks, service affiliation, age, and hometowns.

And he was accused of being unpatriotic.

To honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country by identifying them by name and face WAS UNPATRIOTIC...and why?  Because of the idea that, unless you supported the war, then it followed that you hated the warriors.  To show their faces and names in death was supposed to be some sort of war protest.

This is a shameful twisting of just what it means to be a patriot.

Samet writes:

"The wonder of our own age is that we can preserve so many of the living, yet our national subordination of the wounded body to the sacrificial ideal of the corpse camouflaged by a flag in a funeral ceremony risks further dehumanizing the U.S. soldiers who continue to risk their lives.  To complicate matters even further, our national preoccupation with the dead coexists with an inability to look at them until they are ready to be buried."

Every day of my life, I weep for the war-dead, for their shattered families and abbreviated lives.  I pray for my nephew and for my son's old unit, which is deployed again to Iraq, and I weep with fear for them.

No one knows better than those who have either buried a loved one cut off by war, or who have written letters of condolence to those mothers of their son's and daughter's buddies, the true cost of war.  There is nothing sentimental about it.  Nothing romantic or glamorous.  It is real and it is gritty and it will tear your heart out.

You don't need a yellow ribbon to remember, for it is scarred across your soul.

And there is a danger in hero-worshipping those who must fight and those who must die, because at some point, it crosses the line from true sorrow and love of country to political expediency.  As Samet puts it:

"The idolatry of sacrifice animates the argument that the only way to honor the soldiers who have died in Iraq is to send more soldiers to do the same...The rhetoric of war sacrifice continues...to submerge any real moral and practical arguments that might be made for troop surge or phased redeployment in a morass of sentimentality..."

She goes on to say:

"We expect mothers of the war dead to grieve, but we also expect mothers of yet-living soldiers to sign on to the notion that only the possible deaths of their own children will somehow honor and validate the sacrifices that have already been made.  More must die to prove that the first to die have not done so 'in vain.'"

I am a Marine mom.  My son stepped up, he volunteered, he gave his all, and now he has re-entered the civilian world, as has one of my nephews.  I am deeply proud of them.  I love them with all my heart, and I love my country.

But I am suspicious of the kind of patriotism that shoves out all honest doubt, all serious questioning, all reasoned discussion in favor of the sentimental gesture and the hyperbolic rhetoric and soaring music of flag-waving political commercials and country-and-western songs sung by young, muscular entertainers who prefer to make money off the soldiers' sacrifices rather than serve themselves.

I resent that the true patriotism of my son and his buddies--the ones who really did make the "noble sacrifice"--has been hijacked and co-opted for political gain, and used as a bludgeon against anyone disagreeing with the war, no matter how much they supported the warriors sent away to fight it.

It has been said that you cannot protest a war without protesting its warriors, but that is wrong, and I have no less an authority on that then the late Colonel Hackworth, who fought valiantly until his dying day for warriors everywhere.

Like most every single combat veteran with whom I have ever spoken, Colonel Hackworth believed in the sacred trust that our warriors put in their civilian leadership; the trust that they will not be put in harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary.

To break that trust for political reasons is a sin that, I believe, is punishable by hell and hell alone.  And the politicians should not go there by themselves; they should take along fellow politicians who used war for political gain themselves; and journalists who refused to ask the hard questions of them before it was too late.

This is the day that the Reverend, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was murdered, and his words on another war from forty years ago resonate today:

"If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos."

Two months after starting a war, President Bush had the unmitigated gall to proclaim the war over and use the announcement to film his own campaign commercial.  Five years and four thousand American deaths later, he is still tossing around all those glory-words like "victory" and "sacrifice," still sending young men and women into the bloody maw, still using the conscientioius objections of American citizens as objects of scorn, still demanding more and more and more and more from those who have already given so much.

Most of the loudest champions of flag lapel-pins in Congress repeatedly vote AGAINST benefits for veterans for health care and education and psychological counseling--including Sen. John McCain, who should know better.

Wounded warriors were hidden away in nasty bug-bitten forgotten hospital rooms for FOUR YEARS before finally being exposed by the Washington Post, and those who waved the flag the most vigorously claimed to be surprised.

If a war-vet returns home with his body blown apart, he can expect a great deal of help if it only involves, say, replacing amputated or blown-away limbs.  But if he comes back with his brain so injured that he has trouble remembering the faces of his children, we turn away.

No glamour in that, no heroic mythology, no stirring, inspirational morning-show stories.

We make many promises to those young volunteers who sign away their lives on the dotted line.

But veterans are discovering that most of the recruiting promises made to them have turned to dust, and the simplest measures to make life better for active-duty troops and veterans--most of which have been put forth by Democrats--are voted down or vetoed by all those fine patriots on Capitol Hill.

Pay for their educations like the World War II and Vietnam vets?  Go visit the website of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, www.iava.org, and look up the list of congresspeople willing to sign on to that bill. 
The state of Texas has sent TEN PERCENT of the war-dead off to fight, and yet only two Texas congresspeople, both Democrats, have signed on.  Neither of our Republican senators seem to think it worth even a molecular fraction of what it costs to maintain a war costing billions each and every month.

Permit soldiers to deploy for only one year, and to get one whole year off before re-deploying to that same war?  Sounds simple.  But no, the Republicans refused to sign on.  Much better to force tour extensions in order to come up with the bodies needed for the so-called "surge," and redeploy troops who have already served multiple times in order to come up with enough cannon fodder to drag on.

So don't talk to me about patriotism.  Unless it is wearing--or has worn--a uniform, I am suspicious of it.

In THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING, Dr. Faust quotes Herman Melville's poem, Battle-Pieces:

My Triumph lasted till the Drums
Had left the Dead alone
And then I dropped my Victory
And chastened stole along
To where the finished Faces
Conclusion turned on me
And then I hated Glory
And wished myself were They.