Today, in my Internet-cruising, I came across an alternately enraging and heartbreaking picture. It is distressing; it is sickening; it is colossally powerful; its reality is chillingly mundane, as far as the wider American world goes.
It's a literal snapshot of the consequences of the Starship Troopers-esque gung-ho-for-blood mentality that infected the United States in a major way pre-Iraq war - a mentality the Bushies would give anything (souls, perchance?) for the populace to engage in again, where Iran is concerned. But whether you're Bill Kristol, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tom Friedman or a regular non-celebrity citizen sharing those esteemed pundits' zeal for war, please know that when I say your war-support comes with death and dismemberment attached, I'm thinking of this man, and his singular predicament.
It's beauty, and the beast; it's the phantom, wandering his opera house; it's the hunchback of Notre Dame, wondering precisely what the fuck happened; it's...a disfigured Marine and his beloved, posing for a wedding portrait - and, as well, a portrait of war's pound-of-flesh demands.
There are subtexts here that tear holes in hearts. There are subtexts here that aren't subtexts at all, in fact...they're too damned graphic, sustained and blatant to be subtexts...they dwell in superstructures raised too high, on too infertile ground.
In his face, deepest despair. In her face, the (post-wounds) war bride's unique awkwardness, based in love's fealty and natural human revulsion. Which of those - love or revulsion - will win the day, in the long run? Will she succumb to the entirely reasonable but guilt-gilded desire to leave him, a war-wounded freak* whom she could plausibly (albeit rather dishonestly) claim carries too much baggage, more than she signed up for?** Will he nobly demand that she leave him for some other paramour, one who's more "normal"? Or are these questions moot in the face of a true love that, despite the picture's redolence with the questions above, will ultimately rule the day? None can say; all can speculate.
My own speculation arrives at this conclusion: they won't last, and not because of love's paucity, either. They won't last because of what's worn on her face, more than his. His is a humiliation transcending word-based explanation, living at the core of the root of his being, but hers is something more pernicious, touched upon in my "war-wounded freak" question. Hers is a submerging in rank and rabid fear, of the intimacies demanded of her with him. Look at the picture, and tell me her gut isn't tied in a thousand knots. The brutality of their diemma is summed up in a truism that goes, he needs her, but she doesn't need him, and that truism (among many others) possessed her when the lens flashed - I wager, at least.
Everyone in America should see this picture and then weigh in on the subject of supporting war over diplomacy, wars of choice, wars not buttressed by supremely infallible intelligence, etc. For this is what war hath wrought - and, by logical extension, what war's supporters have wrought. They disfigured this young man as surely as any Iraqi did, for they agitated that he be put in harm's way for no good reason. I hope beyond hope this man's marriage survives, for that may be another casualty of this stinking, rotten boutique war.
I wonder: if Bill Kristol or Joe Lieberman studied this picture, took it in deep, would they still be so pro-war?
*Please know that I am not calling this man a freak. I am merely stating that the world will assuredly treat him as such, no matter how sensitively it considers the man's plight. You can believe that a 3-year-old child will instinctively recoil from this man; that's his Iraq war-derived lot in life. That - the jettisoning of political correctness, and embracing of life's hard-core truths - is what I was referencing with "freak."
**Anyone who marries/is intimate with a member of the military is likewise marrying the possible consequences of war. Given that every soldier/airman/seaman goes to war first and asks questions about its legitimacy later (or doesn't ask those questions at all), disfiguring wounds and outright death are always a president's-order away, for military members. But life's rich layer of complications, particularly of the heart, must be weighed, no matter the facts of any given matter. Hence, her understandably human desire to say, "I didn't sign up for this," if she were to say those words at all - a simultaneously understandable yet dishonest claim, on her part.