War is Not Some Game, Folks
This is your reminder that terms like "warfighting" and "most lethal military force" mean killing real people
You know me as a cheerful desert hippie, a writer and editor, and the fiancée of
, creator, publisher, and CEO of God of the Desert Books. And on July 12 - in just a couple weeks - we'll officially be a husband-and-wife creative team!But in another lifetime, almost 20 years ago, I spent four years planning to marry an Iraqi journalist and translator I met in college. And this just so happened to be during the Iraq War.
Because “Amir" and I were both internationally inclined, multilingual, pathologically curious people, I left our relationship with some rudimentary Arabic, a great respect for Islam, and a kind of real-world master's degree in Middle East political dynamics.
Outreach was our mission; understanding was the name of the game. We spoke in schools and were even interviewed once or twice about the positive element the US military brought to Baghdad - Amir explained that soldiers were escorting children to school and women through the marketplace; that the security the US brought was both welcome and necessary.
We also sought to explain that Islam is a religion of peace: that regular Muslims are just people living their lives, with no hatred for the West or for other religions, and that to consider all Muslims war-mongering extremists would be akin to believing that all Christians hate LGBTQ+ people. (You see, at the time, that was a laughable idea.)
When Amir finished his degree at the university where we met, he moved to the Detroit area, hoping to join the largest Iraqi community outside of Iraq and land a translation job. Initially, he moved in with an American journalist friend who'd fought in Iraq, living as roommates while Amir looked for a job.
He was a nice guy, but when he published an article about missing the Iraq war - missing fighting, missing the constant supply of adrenaline, missing the sense of being on a mission - I was furious. War is not a game! War was not a fun little diversion set up for him. And those adrenaline rushes came from surviving while someone else died.
Sure, those people they were killing were “the enemy." But before the days of fighting cult-of-personality rebel leaders and their militias, each individual man doing mandatory service in Iraq’s army was as responsible for Saddam Hussein's atrocities - let alone the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack - as I am for what Donald Trump eats at lunch.
Amir moved out. I'll never forget the first time he applied for an apartment. The managing board nodded along politely as he explained in perfect English his three advanced degrees, the Western NGOs he'd worked with and written for, and his time as personal translator to Sean Penn, then asked with straight faces, “And how many terrorists do you know, personally? Will you be bringing them here?"
Those people learned something that day.
Given our current events of the past few days, I was thinking about all this as I scrolled Facebook this morning. I came upon a startling photo and refreshed myself on the awful story of Tyler Ziegel.
Tyler Ziegel, an Illinois man born in 1982, was a US Marine Sargeant who was burned beyond recognition in Iraq when a suicide bomb went off near him. Tyler had to have his left arm amputated. Three fingers were blown off his right hand. His ears were gone. He was left blind in one eye, with a hole in his browbone, irretrievable shrapnel in his skull, and a metal plate in his head. More than 30 surgeries failed to restore to him a typical facial landscape.
And he came home and married his high school sweetheart. She'd promised to marry him when he came back, and when she was 21 and he was 24 - changed, surely, in more ways than one, and she along with him - they tied the knot.
The media adored this all-American, “love never dies" story, but the wretched wedding photo - this exploitative, award-winning photo - in which the bride, a civilian, is the one who looks shell-shocked and her deeply-traumatized veteran groom actually looks humiliated, seems to whisper to us that this wasn't going to work, that the couple would be divorced within a year.
And they were. Tyler Ziegel lost his life in 2012, in what may have been an accidental overdose of heroin and alcohol. Many search results for Renée Kline portray a beautiful, happy brunette, but I cannot be sure whether any of them are this Renée Kline, who was once married to Tyler Ziegel: I have to admit I don't publicize my failed first marriage, either.
This is what war does. It turns lovers into strangers. It turns dedicated military wives into widows and husbands into widowers; it makes angry, worried children missing a parent out of kids who used to be happy and secure. On the “enemy" side, it creates orphans and childless onetime parents.
War scars individuals physically and entire generations psychically; it wipes towns off the map, it imprisons all involved in fear and panic. It kills people, real people - even when some of the soldiers escort children to school.
So as Donald Trump interrupts his own self-imposed two weeks to think about bombing Iran to just go ahead and do it; as Iran bombs the US base in Qatar; as we seem to alternately lurch and sprint toward war with Iran, let's remember what escalating this would mean to regular people. In this case, we are talking about a population that largely despises Khamanei and is not to be considered complicit in his crimes.
Thus far, there are - miraculously, it seems to me - no casualties reported in either our attack on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan or in Iran's attack on the US’ Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, Qatar. That's wonderful. But this is still dangerous business, and it's easy to see how this could metastasize into on-the-ground combat such as that in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Keep in mind that only Congress can declare the United States of America to be at war. Even if you think this is great - and I grant you, Iran is the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world, Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei is a tyrant, and Iran's girls and women have much, much less freedom today than their mothers did before the 1979 Islamic Revolution - we must encourage people to understand that President Trump needs to stay within clearly-constitutional bounds. It's not at all clear that his Operation Midnight Hammer was legal.
Why nitpick? Because war isn't a game. It's not “fun;" it's certainly not something to miss someday, when it's over. This conflict could turn deadly very, very quickly - and not just for Iran.
