War and the wounded

Those who defend warfare tend to see it only as an abstraction, a game pitting strategists from opposing collectives against one another in furtherance of contrived objectives. The ugly details of orchestrated butchery and torture are to be suppressed, lest persons of humane sensitivities become upset and demand a cessation of the game. But facts have ways of insinuating themselves into the most carefully devised schemes, causing the sordid nature of warfare to move from the abstract to the concrete. When this occurs – as it did in the My Lai massacre or, more recently, at Abu Ghraib – the political establishment is quick to look for scapegoats or explanations that do not implicate war itself. To the state, the professed ends of any given war are both irrelevant and fungible: it is the war system that requires protection.

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"When I saw the stumps, I thought, `Damn, both of them?' Then I looked at my leg and I was trying to figure how to put a tourniquet on it because I didn't have any hands."

The rocket-propelled grenade that ripped off James Eddie Wright's hands and tore into his left leg ended the war for him and changed his life forever.

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