"So?"

(Go here for context)

Back on Sunday evening, my mother called to tell me that my brother, who has spent the past year in northern Iraq with his Army Reserve unit, was in Kuwait and would be coming home "with everyone they went there with," my mom said he said. Well, good. But you may also remember that it was on Sunday that the 4,000th U.S. serviceman was killed in Iraq. As I write this, he is now at Ft. Riley, Kansas, a mere couple of hours away from Wichita--too busy being debriefed (and decompressing, no doubt) to see family, but that's okay. After this weekend, he'll head back to his home in California.

Can I tell you that I actually felt a bit of guilt for being happy that my brother was coming home safely? Can I tell you that the first thing I found myself thinking about as my mom shared the good news with me was the images of the flag-draped coffins of servicemen and -women arriving in transport planes that the Defense Department didn't even want the public to know about? (Image found here) My brother is not in a box like that, and yet I was thinking of those men and women who were and are and will be in boxes like that. Is that a strange thing?

And I was thinking as well how the prior secrecy over those pictures, as I wrote here almost four years ago, was the most explicit sign we had yet had that, fight this war we would, but woe betide the men or women who revealed to the public any sense of the real costs of this war.

The point of this post isn't to rehash the war. Clearly, even those who most devoutly wished this particular consummation no longer much care to do rehash it. (Clearly, we all should do this--it's just not this post's point.) And for the record, I stand now by what I said in that earlier post--though, as you'll see, it's hard to feel terribly cheery as I reread it. The point of this post is both to welcome back my brother and to be honest about something: a certain perplexed guilt that this is the first armed conflict in which we as a nation have not been asked to sacrifice even indirectly through increased taxes, even as we have been told that in this conflict the stakes have never been higher than at any time since World War II. I'm not being coy or disingenuous when I say that I just don't get that. But then again, given the impetus behind the single-word statement that serves as this post's title, perhaps my perplexity is beside the point. Ours is not to question why/etc., etc.