a human face to the war

If I had to give the war in Iraq just one human face, it would be the face of Jeff Cole.

A corporal in the U.S. Army Reserves, Jeff is no longer fighting for his life against terrorists or insurgents in Iraq. He is now fighting for his life at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., as a result of injuries he received while serving in Iraq. Unlike the faceless and nameless thousands I’ve read about who were stationed in the Middle East since the start of the war, Jeff is the first soldier I’ve known personally. He really is the boy next door.

The Coles became our neighbors in 1987, the year before I graduated from high school. I’ve known him since he was 4 years old and still small enough for me to pick him up by the wrists and spin him around in the back yard.

Having enlisted in the Reserves in part to pay for college, Jeff was called up for active duty in Iraq about six months ago. On July 15, he was in what I am told was an accident that killed two other people, when another military vehicle rolled onto the one Jeff was in.

Two other men in the back with Jeff were killed. Only he and the driver survived and, for a while, that was touch-and-go. Medics at the scene initially were concerned Jeff would bleed to death and then, when they had him stabilized, that he might lose his leg because of a compound fracture.

In Iraq, doctors managed to set the bones in his leg — although there are doubts whether he will ever be able to use it again, because of nerve damage — and operated to repair a punctured kidney. From Iraq, he was flown to Germany, where his parents were waiting for him, and then to Washington, D.C., where he was admitted to Walter Reed Hospital.

Jeff’s prognosis for recovery has improved drastically just by virtue of being at Walter Reed, but it’s still far from certain. Infection already has set in and he’s considered at high risk for fever and for pneumonia. He’s been in and out of consciousness ever since and there’s still some uncertainty whether he’ll come out of this with both legs, or even with his life.

Count him as another victim of the war on terror.

It’s taken me a while to sort out my feelings on what’s happened to him. I’ve been opposed to the war in Iraq from the beginning. This was a war to remove the sovereign of another state who had taken no overt action against us or our allies in 10 years. It was a war where we lacked the support of world opinion, where our drum-beating has been uncertain in its justification at best and where we lacked the moral authority we had after the first Gulf War.

In that sense, Jeff as a soldier becomes a fair target under the terms of engagement for those resisting the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

On the other hand, Saddam Hussein is a snake. I don’t doubt for a minute that Iraq is better today under its new government than it was three years ago under him.

If “accident” is simply a military euphemism for an attack that can’t be discussed for security reasons, then the people who primarily bear the guilt for Jeff’s injuries and for the deaths of his companions are his attackers.

In all likelihood, these are the same monsters who consider it sporting to behead innocent civilians and captured servicemen or who think that God considers it a glorious act of devotion to blow up themselves and as many innocent people as are around.

It’s because of such people that we cannot abandon Iraq until and unless its new national government asks us to.

At the moment, the Iraqi people are sandwiched between the hope for a democratic republic where basic human rights are respected and an unholy theocracy where those rights are trampled. They didn’t ask to be there, but that’s where they are.

Nations such as the Philippines have acquiesced to the demands of the terrorists and backed out of the coalition to save the life of a single prisoner. Each concession has emboldened the terrorists to pile one atrocity on to another.

If we leave Iraq before the nation is stable again, we will embolden the terrorists far more than they ever have been before. And there are many more Jeff Coles in Iraq and here in the United States whose lives would be put at risk by such a move.

I can’t blame President Bush for what happened to Jeff. In the end, that judgment belongs to God alone, who will make every president and king answer for all the blood spilled in these wars.

And even though I disagree that we had the right, the moral authority or the prerogative to invade Iraq, I don’t think he is some kind of monster for doing so. Whatever else Bush may be, he’s not a monster. He at least is trying to bring new order to the Middle East and to kindle hope for the future. He wants to make the world a better place.

And the world is not one boy who is fighting to make it to his 21st birthday, even though it seems like it to the people who know him.