On wounded journalists and faceless soldiers

I had planned to blog yesterday about the deaths of CBS cameraman Paul Douglas and sound man James Brolan, and the injuries to correspondent Kimberly Dozier yesterday, but wasn't sure what I wanted to say -- and I'm still not sure....because it troubles me that American soldiers are dying every day in Iraq, but it's only when journalists fall that the war really seems to "come home."

Marie Cocco writes about the response of returning soldiers to apathy that Americans feel about this war, as they obsess instead about the American Idol winner or about an injured racehorse or the Brangelina Baby.

Cocco attributes the apathy to the fact that the all-volunteer military means that fewer of us know someone who has actually served. I can recall a Thanksgiving dinner during the Vietnam war at the home of a family friend, in which the grace said before the meal prayed for the safety of one guest's son who was serving in Vietnam -- a son who as yet unbeknownst to anyone at the table, was already dead. When we later found out that he had been killed, it was the first time the Vietnam war seemed real to me.

And that was a war that was heavily covered -- warts and all -- on television.

Today, we get war sanitized for public consumption. The dead are brought home under cover of darkness. The wounded are tucked away at Walter Reade Medical Center, invisible to the yellow ribbon types who continue to pump dozens of gallons of Middle Eastern petrofuel into their gas-guzzlers all the while talking about turning the entire region into glass and then go home to watch the Yankees play baseball.

The war in Iraq has become something to which we've become accustomed, so we shrug it off.

For those of us who lived through the Vietnam era, there's a depressing sense of dejá vu about the whole thing. Already there are veterans of this war who are homeless. There are veterans who are suffering the kind of permanent emotional damage that will make it nearly impossible for them to live normal lives. And Congress continues to cut veterans' benefits as it shovels more and more of our tax dollars into the pockets of the already preposterously wealthy.

But these are just faceless young men and women, because the government and the military hide them away from our sight. We don't know them. It's only when we see a 23-year-old kid with no arms and a 14" scar running across his skull that we even think about what's happening in Iraq -- or when a face we're accustomed to seeing on the evening news is a casualty.

So while we're wishing Kimberly Dozier a quick recovery, and continue to hope that ABC correspondent Bob Woodward continues to recover, we ought also to think of the many faces we DON'T see on the evening news -- and once again demand that they be brought home.