Three days after Christmas I drove to Jacksonville. I sewed patches on duffel bags. I stood on a tarmac on an unusually warm December day and sent Robert Germino off to war.
I often wonder what he will be like when he comes home after a year and a half in Iraq — if he will still have two legs and two hands — if he will be able to sleep at night — if he will still be able to function as an adult if he is injured. I even wonder if he will come home.
Most of all I wonder if it’s worth the price we pay.
You may not be serving in the military. You may never serve in the military or be in a military family. But every American citizen pays a small price for the war we wage in Iraq.
To be exact, $365 per person, per year.
And the cost is rising. In the 2007 National Budget $60 billion will be spent on defense, which is more than previous years. While money should go to defense, it should also be spent on other things like affordable public education, health care and rebuilding the gulf.
In fact, most defense spending doesn’t go toward defending America.
Those of us from North Carolina are familiar with the 82nd Airborne in Fayetteville. This division is always on call, ready to deploy any where in the world within 18 hours — or I should say, used to be able to. Pentagon officials told the New York Times that “of the 20 brigades not in Iraq none have enough equipment and manpower to be sent quickly into combat except a unit in South Korea.”
The Navy is also being stretched. Ninety-nine percent of the deployable fleet is in action, according to globalsecurity.org, which tracks the location of deployed troops and contractors. In the event of a national crisis the people defending us will first have to leave the Middle East. That doesn’t make me feel safe and it doesn’t convince me that being in Iraq has made America and our world a safer place.
Iraq isn’t safer either. Since the war has started 500,000 Iraqis have died, and those living in the torn country are suffering too. In an ABC news survey, seven in 10 Iraqis showed signs of traumatic stress. The citizens in Iraq are not better off than they were just a few years ago and the hope many of them had after Saddam was overthrown no longer exists.
A war that began with “shock and awe” has come at a truly shocking price tag; one that can’t even be summed up with numbers. There are things this price tag cannot describe: the emotional and mental toll on our generation, the financial burden we will be paying off for years to come, the broken relationships abroad that will take years to begin to mend.
We will be paying for years to come, but we don’t have to keep the costs mounting. We should start to spend money more efficiently when it comes to our military. We should be wary of our troops being over deployed and under cared for. And we should evaluate the cost of Iraq. Supporting the troops does not mean supporting the war — it means asking them to pay a cost. Is it a cost we can afford to pay?
