Baghdad ER & Southern Moms
by Liv | Published on May 30th, 2006, 10:27 am | Life
What is it about the south that even during a time of war, parents proudly send their sons and daughters off to war as if it were some sort of benefit to their lives? What other career do we say, hey you might get dead or dismembered, and we're so glad you chose to be a Marine.
This is just one of the topics that has made the circle of gossip around the water-cooler at the "real job". A mother continuously beckons how her son will be safe from injury since he's smart and will be a mechanic therefore not necessarily in harms way? "Sure," I think... "don't mechanics have to be where the fighting is, in order to fix the stuff?" But I don't exactly vocalize that. I don't want to be rude. She's very proud, but yet, I can't help but feeling either she's blatantly ignoring the atrocity of her sons choice, or is completely naive.
My fears were compounded last night when I happened to be channel surfing on our living room television. I came across a show called "Baghdad ER". It's an HBO Documentary Film directed by Jon Alpert & Matthew O'neill. The tag line for the show is "on behalf of the President and a grateful nation, I present you with the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat."
At first take I assumed the show would be liberally slanted, it is HBO after-all. But Baghdad ER really doesn't have dialogue or a script, it simply films the events of this emergency room in Baghdad Iraq. In what I imagine is the first time on TV, we see the gruesome, ogrish, and the horrors that kept many of our Grandparents from talking about their war days. But this isn't our parents, nor our grandparents- this is our children, our brothers, and our sisters.
Last night they showed naked bodies torn open with organs protruding. In one scene they take a medical sawzall and cut through a soldiers arm, and simply toss it in the medical waste bin. Another soldier has his hand blown apart from an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), and in another scene we see a leg torn from knee to ankle with muscles protruding.
I was captivated and emotionally attached from the first few minutes of the show. I began hating Bush and this war even more, second by second while in the same breath I tried to intellectualize these were the prices of a war. The truth is I spent a good part of the program crying as soldiers called home to their moms and wives to let them know they had been hit. Worse was the number who died, and those in their infantry had to deal with losing a friend. Two soldiers who were on their first day in combat were hit by an IED and had shrapnel embedded in their heads. They appeared shell shocked, and even remarked that they knew the risk, but didn't think it would happen to them.
The show was humbling, and emotional, but perhaps the best war documentary I had ever seen. It should be recommended watching for all these southern moms who think sending their children to the middle east is a proud moment for their family. Serving your country used to be a proud thing. Sending your kid off in the middle of some mad man's crusade to oust your dads enemy and procure more oil for your money grubbing Bush family.... is murder.
There I said it...