Home at last Op-Ed: A father welcomes his son back from Iraq BY NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN

My son has returned from the war. After a year in Iraq he has come back to his wife and the rest of us unharmed in body. I don’t know about his spirit. Soldiers must see and do things which may leave, even if invisible, terrible scars. I hope that has not happened to him.

My son is a real soldier. He was not some general’s adjutant. He was not in Emerald City, as the Green Zone is sardonically called by some people. That zone in Baghdad is where the politicians, the generals, the NGO officials, businessmen, and various forms of war profiteers reside in comparative safety while people like my son take the risks. My son was at the front, riding in those cheesy Humvees, the ones without the armor, that Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thinks are good enough for my son and the other men and women whom he sent to wage war with hand-me-down, just-make-do-with-it equipment.

My son did make do with it. They all do. A National Guardsman, he was called up and did his duty and he must have done it well in the eyes of his superiors because they promoted him to Staff Sargent. He did other than his military duty while he was there. He made friends with Iraqi family men and gave out toys to these men’s children by people back here. A man in Thomaston with a grandson in Iraq made wooden tractors, a woman in Tenants Harbor sent dolls.

My son is not a particularly political person. I don’t think he was trying to do something grand like winning hearts and minds. I think he just wanted the children to have dolls and toy trucks and crayons and coloring books. There are other soldiers doing the same and I cannot stand the thought that, while he was getting these few small things to Iraqi children, high officials in Washington were exchanging memos on just how much torture they could order our people to administer without shocking the conscience of the world. When I first read about the torture programs, I thought about how some parents’ sons and daughters would be ordered to do these things. I thought, thank goodness my son was not told to do what people should not do to each other, but I also thought how these memos and the orders to carry them out reflected on my son and all the others with whom he served, how others might look at my son in his uniform and say to themselves that maybe he . . .

It is one thing if President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Gonzales have inured themselves to disgrace and are indifferent to being thought of as brutes, but it is another thing for them to dump this bucketful on American men and women in the uniform of their country. The President repeats the word "freedom" ad nauseam; he might meditate on the shame he has brought on brave and dutiful men and women who deserve a better cause.

Abraham Lincoln said of soldiers who did serve in a better cause, "Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan." My son comes back from the desert to the snow to hear his President rail against taxes on the rich, while asking that taxes be raised on veterans’ medical benefits. So much for the widow and the orphan.

The burden of this war which we hear spoken of so often has been born by my son and thousands of other men and women. They have made all the sacrifices bombastic politicians so lightly speak of, they have borne all the risks, they have paid all the costs while others have gotten rich off them, have gotten elected and re-elected off them and, if not that, had the pleasure of swaggering around with a bully boy American flag in their lapels and a ribbon stamped with "I Support The Troops" on the hoods of their $45,000 automobiles and pickup trucks.

The ribbons get me the most. Every time I saw one in the Bangor Sam’s Club during the months my son has been in combat, his life and safety in danger, I felt a shiver of anger. I wanted to wait in the parking lot for the owner of that big, fat, preposterous automobile and ask him, "Just how do you support the troops? How do you support my troop? Have you volunteered your blood to the Red Cross? Have supported higher taxes to pay for the war? Have you volunteered for it yourself, encouraged your children to go to war? What have you done, other than expropriate patriotic symbols you have no special claim to display to intimidate people who have had the social courage to question the death and the maiming of so many of our people and so many Iraqi people who had suffered under Saddam’s tyranny only to suffer again under American liberation?"

It is said that of all the children of all the Congresspersons and all the Senators, only one is on active duty in a combat zone. It is easier to make war when you know that you will be safe and are sending other people’s children to fight it while your own loved ones are out of harm’s way. That goes part of the way toward explaining the ease with which our public personages threaten death and destruction on the peoples of this or that nation.

The observation I am making here is not the familiar complaint about fairness or equality or any of that kind of knee trembling. It is the incontestable truth that the politicians and the news personalities who talk so blithely about war would adopt a different and more cautious tone in their advocacy of killing others were they to know a degree of risk attaches to themselves and their own kith and kin should war ensue. It would be a more peaceful world if the law read that the children of every elected official and every TV news celebrity would immediately be drafted on the commencement of hostilities.

It would not end wars, I’m sorry to say, but it would make them less frequent and the reasons for fighting them would be starkly clear. My son was sent to fight a war which millions of his own countrymen had no particular interest in, whose aims fluctuated month to month and which the President could not explain without raising the suspicion that he was lying or, worse yet, that he was a confused, ill-informed hysteric with only fuzzy notions of why he was doing what he had already done.

For the close relatives and friends of a soldier in combat it can never be easy because they cannot know their soldier’s true situation. You cannot decide whether to turn on the TV or not. In the end, many of us choose not to watch, not only because some of the pictures are painful to see, but because Iraq is the worst reported war since the Great War of 1914-1918, which has no equal for official lying and withholding of information. The governments then thought they had to keep the truth from their peoples because they were afraid what would happen if the actual number of deaths on the battlefield got out.

In my son’s war, it is not yet possible to say how much of what was pumped out into the media was propaganda and lies and how much was confusion, ineptitude, rock-headed stupidity, incompetence, and ignorance masquerading as authoritative knowledge. This has been a war reported by terrified journalists rightly afraid to go out on the streets because they are in danger of getting their throats slit, by journalists who often are inexperienced rookies sent into danger by editors short on scruples who will take any story, right, wrong, or off-the-wall crazy, as long as they have a ratings pumper-upper.

It will be a long time, if ever, before we raise a statue to my son’s war. The President who presided over it has yet to attend the funeral of one of my son’s fallen comrades, so the marble cenotaphs will be a long time coming. This war has so tarnished military service, the President is forced to offer increasingly large bounties to get people to reup.

My son is back now, having served well and honorably even as his President distances himself from those he sent to war. It will not necessarily be a good thing if one of the side effects of this war is to discourage men and women like my son from serving, thus forcing the government to hire people of dubious character to join up for the money rather than enlisting men and women who want to serve their nation.

My son was sent to fight in a bad war but he was a good soldier and we would do well to remember that the good soldiers are the guardians of the night.

Nicholas von Hoffman can be reached at portland-feedback@phx.com