The War Comes Home
Ether Zone.com | 15 Apr 2004 | Sean Scallon
THE WAR COMES HOME
ANOTHER TRAGEDY
By: Sean Scallon
To some Americans, the war in Iraq is as distance as the space between the two countries on the globe. To the people of Ellsworth, Wisconsin, the war became a very close and real thing on March 11.
On that day a solider showed up on the door of the home of Larry and Peggy Hoyer with the news that their 23-year old son Bert, died in Iraq, that day, killed by what's called an IED, a fancy military acronym for booby trapped explosive while a part of a convoy traveling near the city of Barquba, north of Baghdad in the infamous "Sunni Triangle."
Hoyer is Ellsworth's first casualty in this war and the second of his unit, the 652nd Engineering Company of the Army Reserves, which, a year ago in February, shipped out for Iraq.
They were supposed to come home in August of that year but the task of rebuilding the shattered remains of Iraq delayed that homecoming. There's been talk the unit may becoming home as a part of the massive troop rotation currently underway to replace those units like the 652nd that have been in the Middle East for over a year. If true, it make his death only more tragic.
Not that PFC Hoyer, a Specialist Fourth Class who earned two medals while in Iraq, didn't know what he was getting into. Even though he was in this reserve unit to help pay for his schooling at Vermillion Junior College in Ely, Minnesota, he was not fool enough to believe that the reserves were some glorified boys scout unit on steroids.
"It's my job," Hoyer told a reporter for the nearby Red Wing, Minn., Republican-Eagle last year when his unit shipped out. "I signed the line."
Hoyer graduated from Ellsworth High School in 1999 and I came to the local newspaper, the Pierce County Herald a year earlier, so I will not say I knew Hoyer well because I didn't. But I know the people who knew Hoyer quite well and they are devestated, particularly those at the high school. His teachers and principals, his coaches for the basketball team he managed for, the staff members who worked on the school plays he starred in, and all the other members of the community who will shed a tear privately or publicly when his funeral takes place here in town. I will have to deal with their saddness for a long time. As will the students at the local middle school. Sixth grade students sent letters to Hoyer and he emailed them in return.
"It's a tragedy that it happened," middle school assistant principal Doug Hatch said to our newspaper in a story on his death that immediately went on our website the day after. "It's a life lesson that we'll all learn about."
I'm sure the middle schoolers and others will have their "lessons" to learn but for me it's less than clear cut. If it were up to me I would bring every one of the soliders in the 652, 82nd, the 173rd, the Marines, the 4th ID, all of them home as soon as possible, where they belong defending our country and not playing nursemaid to people brimming on the verge of turmoil. But that's just the problem. One doesn't not have to be a geostrategist to know that pulling out all foreign troops in Iraq would lead to chaos and civil war in a place as artifically constructed as Yugoslavia, and we all know what happened there.
And if that ever happened, the angriest and most bitter people you would ever meet would be members of the 652nd and other units, especially those who are from Pierce County whom I also know and who also serve in the miltary honorably and bravely for largely the same reasons Hoyer did. They believe in the mission they were given by President Bush and their leaders in the military to remove Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party from power and rebuild Iraq because that's what they've been told do and accomplish, not because they are neoleftist empire builders. Non-ideological Americans have always believed they can do the impossible because it is a part of the ethos of the nation and its people. We can do anything because we are Americans. The laws of history do not apply to us. We are special, chosen by God. We're are not just the indespensible nation, we are the impervious nation. To leave like I would wish would mean, even though Saddam has been captured and the Baath Party no more, that PFC Hoyer would have died in vain, died in a useless war. Such a thought is unthinkable in the military. The Vietnam Syndrome, the Lebanon Syndrome or even the Somalia Syndrome, is not about death. Soliders die in war, people know this. It's about dying for nothing, dying in defeat, either because we got scared and cut and run from a fight or bit off too much and left ourselves exposed and vunderable. That's the divide in America, take your pick.
Yet nation building a country like Iraq in our image is something even Superman would have given a second thought to. To build a new nation out of nothing and of such disperate elements in one of the most inhospitable places on earth may be more than one nation, one military can do on its own (and no amount of 200 Mongolians or Japanese noncombatants changes the fact that this is America's show for the most part). The track record is decidedly mixed, with variables and special circumstances abound. Certainly within the Third World, in places like South Vietnam, Haiti, Lebanon and Somalia, there have been bad memories with history still waiting to decide upon Afganistan and Iraq. We're even trying once again at Haiti. To be a solider is never to do anything half-way or though half-measures, yet have we set the bar too high that no amount of jumping will reach it?
Bert Hoyer's name will be chisled into the Pierce County War Memorial in front of the courthouse steps here in Ellsworth. If history repeats itself, he won't be the last young man from Ellsworth, from Pierce County, from Wisconsin and from America to die in war. That's not dilemma. The dilemma is whether or not there will be a meaning in their deaths or none at all.
"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
Posted 03/15/2004 08:03:46 pm CST by
Milo Bloom
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