A Bowl of Stupid

I know I’m bit behind on this one, but I think it bears discussion – especially given the recent decision of President Bush and his “Ministry of Love” to re-deploy into Iraq and the surrounding areas of Syria & Iran (read: Vietnam and the surrounding areas of Cambodia & Laos).

The Replacements is “the War Blog of 1LT Adam Tiffen, an Infantry Officer that served in Iraq from May 2005 – May 2006.” Tiffen started his blog in 2005 for family and friends while he was stationed outside Baghdad. He then gained a loyal readership of strangers who came to rely on his posts, and worried if he would miss a day. He wrote in details of the soldier’s “human experience” – the emotions, the textures, the visceral moments that troops experience each day. Thankfully, he returned safely from Iraq, and now resides in Arlington, Virginia.”

Admittedly, I only recently learned about 1LT Tiffen’s blog after reading an interesting piece in the Washington Post. Through Crooks and Liars, I also learned that Mother Jones interviewed Tiffen last month after Garry Trudeau picked up one of Tiffen’s blog posts for his new project, The Sandbox, a best-of showing of military blog posts (what Trudeau calls the first “GWOT literary magazine”).

What is particularly interesting to me is that Lt. Tiffen and I have much in common and, but for my injuries, I quite possibly would have been put in the same situation as he.

Tiffen joined the Army ROTC while he was studying at George Washington Law School, after which he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Maryland National Guard. He was working on an insider-trading case at Porter Wright when the unit he’d trained with was called up for duty in Iraq. Although Tiffen was already in another unit by then, he volunteered to go.

“People asked me, what are you doing?” Tiffen said, laughing. “You’re a nice Jewish boy. You’re a lawyer, Why are you in the Army? Why are you in the infantry? Why are you in Iraq?”

One of my friends with whom I practiced law in California did the exact same thing as Tiffen. And I remember asking him the same questions, only mine were not as eloquent. My questions ranged from “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” to “Are you out of your freaking mind?” Maybe it was the way I phrased the questions, or maybe it was our then widely divergent views on the President’s intent on invading another sovereign country, but I never got any response from my friend.

In contrast, Tiffen explained, “When soldiers you respect ask you to go with them, I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t stay home and wave goodbye to these guys.”

I don’t know the Lieutenant (who seems like a truly stand-up guy), but I applaud his actions and his comments in this regard. Personally, I still wonder if I was better off by getting injured (which prevented me from going to active duty after ROTC). On some level, despite all my “misgivings” about the war and those running it (to put it extremely mild), I wish I could have helped out comrades, even if the cause be not just.