You have to understand something: I've never been to war.

In my privilege, I have never had to kill anyone, never had the people I work with die violently around me.  In my little blind life, I've never had to worry about driving down the street and getting killed.

I can leave this building and drive across Texas.  I'm not hemmed in by the threat of madmen and remote explosives.  My clothes are free of armor.

The air in my house doesn't smell like dust.  Unless you've been on oxygen recently, you can't imagine that, I realize.  Last night I was drinking an ice cold Lone Star longneck in my air conditioned house.  Complaining.

Complaining of the pain in my right side, a back injury brought on by sedentary life.  An injury of privilege.  You were on patrol along a five mile stretch of hiway outside of Baghdad.  You're an infantryman, a foot soldier.  You are the front line; where you go, the fight is.  Cramped into the gunner's position in a humvee, you were somehow able to get your body mostly into the steel tube of the gunner position when the vehicle was split in half by an IED.

You were able to live.  That one horrific explosion, a tearing bang that left you partially deaf.  The explosion made you yell, you wanted it to stop just because it was so loud and so wrong.  So out of place.  Not supposed to happen.  Ugly and frightening and huge.

Your driver, a Specialist from Oklahoma City.  You saw him after, because he didn't shout his name in response to the welfare check, you looked down and there he was.  And there is your nightmare for the rest of your life, until the next one comes along.

His face missing.

I slept last night in a bed with city traffic roar and my wife's light breathing.  I lay there thinking of you, of your world.  Your war.  That sudden bang.  The weight of your armor, worn and sweat-soaked.  The sight of you dropping down, crying at the loss of one of your friends.  It's OK, you know, to lose faith.  You can't have faith without losing it every now and again, to remind you where it comes from and why it is needed.

I've never been in war.  I've never been shot at.  I've not helped your fight in any meaningful way.  I'm one of those hard to understand sorts, a guy who supports the troops but doesn't support the war.  That doesn't make a lot of sense: how can you support the soldier and not the cause?  Well, I can tell you it's because I don't think of soldiers the way war does.  I don't think of you as being ammunition, supplies, expendable.  War accepts your loss.  War demands it, requires it; if there isn't dead and injured, there isn't war.    I am related to old soldiers, wars removed by generations, they still have nightmares, still won't talk about the relationship between them being alive and the men they killed being dead.  They walk around, smiling.  Lucky.  And I know them as uncles and grandfathers, and my knowledge of them is as a human, family.

So how, then, to support the soldier, the guy who has his life changed so suddenly by cheap remote bombs placed by cowards?  I can buy things for you, send you stuff.  I can write you anonymously or, if I know one of you, directly.  I can go out and drum up frothing righteous anger at the loss of another soldier, demand that all of you return or we'll vote.

Some of that, I do.  But so much of it feels hollow.  Lacking any of the direct care that I so wish to somehow supply.  Lacking any comradeship.  You are my countryman.  There's got to be a better way.

I have no idea why you signed up.  Duty?  Honor? Money? School? Love?  Fate?  You walked into a recruiters office and you signed your life to them, and they loaded you into their machine and sent you, your friends, your driver, sent you down that road.

Who's responsible?  The coward that killed your driver?  The men who sit in positions of power, the guys with the suits?  The commanders?  Something lofty like God or our thirst for oil?

Who gets the blame?

You'll get airlifted to Germany, then to Walter Reed for surgeries and therapy.  There are something like 17,500 or so wounded soldiers.  Many of them have flown this same route, Germany to Walter Reed.  The air smells like diesel and vomit and blood, they clean up the planes as good as they can but they've had guys exanguinate and expire, guys who were little more than the tubes feeding them.  Guys, normal guys.

Guys like you.  Kids. Old guys from middle America in the reserves.  Kids from the inner city.  Guys with favorite beers, guys with snapshots of highschool girlfriends, guys with dogs and favorite music and excellent barbequeue recipes.  People with dreams, with kids, spouses, friends. They got into the military for the retirement, for the life.

You'll get on that plane to Germany, but they left you on that road, your humvee broken in half like a toy thrown by a petulent child God.  They left you there, staring at the hole in the head of your friend, the hole where his face used to be.

Things no person should see.

I hope, I hope that you're going to be OK.  Things here are the same as always: people take sides, they fight invisible fights that seem so large and important.  They sit in their airconditioned houses.  They wait for the movie to end.  You'll find that it's the same as it was, but that your volume is up so loud and your tempo set so fast that it feels all wrong, that the gleam of future is dulled by this mundane thing.  So little comfort in empty stripmall America.  The world here is slow and cold, but has Home.  Your family want you back in one piece.  Will you be?

When you get back, I hope you'll get in touch.  This country is empty without it's young men, without the noise and fire y'all bring to the world.  I'll be here, Lone Star in hand, waiting to celebrate your luck.

And if you don't make it, or your body does but your spirit is left behind, we'll all be here to do what we can, to help where we can.  To hopefully bring every other soldier home, somehow end this stupid and brutal killing.