In a piece about POWs for Vox, David Brown nails the weird state of The Forever War that the United States has been fighting since September 12, 2001.
To a certain extent this is understandable. Those of us who were adults when combat operations began on October 7, 2001 understood the context for war, largely accepted and supported it, and for a long time went about our lives understanding its necessity. Today, there are privates in the Army who were still in pre-school on 9/11. To them, we have always been a nation at war. There have always been flag-draped coffins, Delta Force raids, black holes in federal budgets, and a perfunctory, indoctrinated “I support the troops” indemnification before any discussion about military affairs. To the 17-year-old soldier or civilian, life without war is only theoretical.
Accordingly, the war exists for most of us in the same nebulous realm as the futures market, steel production, foreign trade, and satellite maintenance. It is at once a part of our lives and entirely removed from it. We accept as a society that there is a war on the other side of the planet and there are soldiers there and they sometimes are killed and there are bad guys and those bad guys are killed in greater number, and there are civilian deaths, and soldiers earn medals and secure buildings and sometimes helicopters are downed. We are trying to rebuild a country and the people don’t necessarily want us there and there is corruption in their government and among our defense contractors and we have spies and commandos and we probably make lamentable deals with awful nations to do terrible things. The president gives speeches and generals address think tanks and cabinet members give press conferences and by and large everyone is fine with this. Not accepting — nobody wants dead Americans or collateral damage — but none of this dominates water-cooler conversations or disrupts our plans to hit the supermarket after work and maybe take the kids to Denny’s for pancakes.
The war goes on, and it is like the background noise in a restaurant. As long as nothing disrupts the murmur, we hardly take notice. But just as when a waiter drops a water glass, we notice when the noise has changed, and we start to listen. We turn and look and ask what happened, who did it, how did it happen, and was the glass full. A rescued prisoner of war is such a disruption — how many people knew that there was a POW to rescue in the first place?