An Unknown Soldier
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
HALIFAX, CANADA — The guy was sitting in the gloomy atrium of a hotel in Tampa, Florida. It was early morning, the plants were drooping and the lights mysteriously low — some kind of economy measure, perhaps. Anyway, he couldn’t see any of that. He was blind. And he had no right leg below the knee.
Terrible burns disfigured his arms and face. The right side of his head was concave, as if depressed by a savage blow. I tried to imagine the explosive force that had twisted his frame: a bomb in Iraq or an improvised explosive device near Kandahar, Afghanistan? There’s a big veterans’ hospital in Tampa.
I tried to imagine something else: how, by what medical ingenuity, this young man’s life had been saved; and how many thousands of other terribly injured Americans have survived the country’s 21st-century wars who would not have survived its 20th-century conflicts — and what toll this will take on the nation, over what period and in what form. Every so often America’s wounds are rendered raw; the faraway wars come home.
More often the hurt is like a dull ache. An employee of the University of South Florida drove me out to the airport. She told tales of middle-aged people out of work for two years, their houses underwater: casualties, these Florida folk, of the easy-credit binge that was the other face of a war-and-shop U.S. decade.
(More here.)
NYT
HALIFAX, CANADA — The guy was sitting in the gloomy atrium of a hotel in Tampa, Florida. It was early morning, the plants were drooping and the lights mysteriously low — some kind of economy measure, perhaps. Anyway, he couldn’t see any of that. He was blind. And he had no right leg below the knee.
Terrible burns disfigured his arms and face. The right side of his head was concave, as if depressed by a savage blow. I tried to imagine the explosive force that had twisted his frame: a bomb in Iraq or an improvised explosive device near Kandahar, Afghanistan? There’s a big veterans’ hospital in Tampa.
I tried to imagine something else: how, by what medical ingenuity, this young man’s life had been saved; and how many thousands of other terribly injured Americans have survived the country’s 21st-century wars who would not have survived its 20th-century conflicts — and what toll this will take on the nation, over what period and in what form. Every so often America’s wounds are rendered raw; the faraway wars come home.
More often the hurt is like a dull ache. An employee of the University of South Florida drove me out to the airport. She told tales of middle-aged people out of work for two years, their houses underwater: casualties, these Florida folk, of the easy-credit binge that was the other face of a war-and-shop U.S. decade.
(More here.)
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