Around midday on September 11, 2001, I wanted revenge, too. I wasn’t anywhere near New York City, Arlington, or Shanksville that Tuesday morning, nor did I lose any loved ones, but I felt much the same as the rest of America: let’s get them back.

Of course, it wasn’t until March 20, 2003 when I finally realized something wasn’t quite right. From that day until now, I’ve never been able to connect the dots between Osama bin Laden’s agenda¹ and Haliburton’s bottom line. I don’t intend to turn this into a political argument about why Allied countries invaded Iraq, and I’m never going to. But when I woke up this morning, poured myself a cup of coffee and caught some of the national headlines, one story in particular caught my attention.

I’ve been to Arlington National Cemetery. I’ve run my hands across some of the 58,000 names on the black granite wall in Washington. I’ve walked on Omaha Beach and stood amongst the 9,387 white marble crosses atop that cliff in Normandy. I’ve met a handful of war veterans. I’ve heard a Virginia man, who was on Omaha Beach in June 1944, tell the most horrific stories of events that transpired on that cloudy day no one could ever truly recreate, not even Spielberg. One of my best friends was a soldier in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I have a tremendous respect for those men and women who have served or continue to serve in our Armed Forces.

Which is why the story of The Hubbard family, of Clovis, California, turns my stomach. Jeff and Peggy Hubbard have three sons, two of which have died in Iraq. The third son, who was ordered in to secure the scene of a helicopter crash in which his brother, Nathan, was a victim, was sent home last week as part of the Army’s Sole Survivor policy. Nathan was just 30 days from returning home for good.

It’s a tragic story, one similar to that of the Niland Brothers which Spielberg loosely used for Saving Private Ryan. I can only hope George W. Bush, and other policy makers, try — no matter how impossible it actually must be — to imagine what it must be like for Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard this week. Maybe then they’ll realize lives can’t be bought (not at any price), and we should end this war before it’s too late.

1. I watched a show on the National Geographic Channel a few night’s ago entitled, “Inside 9/11.” At the end of the 2-hour episode, Osama bin Laden was shown hiding in the mountains of Pakistan. With sounds of American bombs exploding in the distance, a western reporter interviewed him. Bin Laden’s last sentence, translated on-screen as a subtitle, read something like this: “Americans love life. We love death. That’s the major difference between us, and the reason we will win.”↩

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 1 pm and is filed under family, life, people, politics, war.