Considering numbers

On his last night in town, I asked my best friend if he was ready to leave, if he was ready for officer basic and ranger school and whatever else he has left before he’ll get deployed. He nodded. “Of course.”

He also sent out a mass e-mail last week, in which he said that though he would miss Bloomington, miss his friends, the bars, tailgating, conversations, tomfoolery and classes, it was “time to stop playing and start serving.”

They were statements delivered with a paradoxical and humbling combination of gravitas and nonchalance – not arrogant, simply matter-of-fact. This combination seems to be common among those in the military, at least when asked about their service: It’s no monumental act of unselfishness and courage, as it is for their families and close friends, but simply a fact of their chosen job.

So after a night spent at Kilroys with his B’town friends, he drove 12 hours to a base in Texas to report for duty as an infantry officer.

Despite what he might claim if he read this – he’d say he hasn’t even done anything yet, that there are people who’ve done four, five, six tours – I’m realizing that his departure was very different than those of my other friends. Those headlines about the ongoing war on terrorism – most recently, increasingly bleak reports regarding Afghanistan – are jumping out at me during my morning scan of the news feeds.

Suddenly, I’m paying attention again.

Of course, there was a time when I followed the ongoing reports from Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan in 2001 – the manner with which we took the capital and removed the Taliban from power, the changes in strategy and emphasis.

But semesters have added up since then, as has the bad news. The roadside bombs, helicopter crashes and AP images, despite my most earnest efforts, have left me in a kind of denial about a conflict that is probably less distant than I’d like to believe.

And while I’ve always abstractly supported “our troops,” it’s an entirely different animal to have a close friend – with the attendant inside jokes, long history, crazy stories and conversations – rather than an acquaintance, heading into the fray.

There is drama in the White House and Pentagon regarding increasing troop deployments to Afghanistan and the implications of such a plan on our strategy in Iraq. It has given me another chance to consider the significance and contents of those numbers.

Doubling the number of troops in the next 12 to 18 months sounds like the right plan. But the mind set of a policy-maker or conscientious news-follower is markedly different from that of a friend, let alone that of a soldier.

While reporting on war brings with it the necessary manipulation of numbers, their sudden personal impact has become a temporary and unwelcome replacement for an absent friend.

If nothing else, it’s been profoundly disconcerting that I require such a connection to war to really care about its aim and its end.