The War Comes Home
Leaders in Washington Finally
Listening to Constituents

Last week I joined my newspaper cohorts Scott Nicholson and Jason Reagan in a musical trio on top of the Mountain Times float at Boone’s Fourth of July parade. We had a blast playing and singing to the King Street crowd and waving like fools to our friends.

In case you are wondering, that was Jason playing the mean blues harp on our float.

Composer and musician Kristy Kruger is currently on a tour of all 50 states to honor the memory of her brother, Lt. Col. Eric Kruger, who was killed in Iraq last November.

A scene from the new HBO documentary Baghdad ER, now available for rent.

Truth be told, because of our tight holiday press schedule that week, we only had time to rehearse three songs for the parade gig. We played Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” borrowed the blues tune “Sweet Home Chicago” for a song we called “Sweet Home Watauga,” and jammed out on some blues in the key of A (the most patriotic of all the musical keys, I believe).

The great thing about playing to a parade crowd is that the audience keeps changing so the songs don’t have to!

After the parade, an acquaintance of mine who knows my opposition to the war in Iraq asked me how I could participate in such a patriotic love-fest. I responded that I still believed America is the greatest country on the planet, it’s just trying to survive a misguided war started by the worst president in my lifetime.

In case you haven’t heard, that’s similar to a conversation that many of our leaders in Washington are having this summer. Democrats have renewed their quest for legislation that will end U.S. involvement in the conflict in Iraq in a timely manner. They have done this at the urging of their constituents, the vast majority of which no longer support the president’s plan for progress and/or victory Iraq.

The bad news for President Bush is that more and more of his followers in the Republican Party are also listening to their constituents. This past week it was announced that several republican senators including Olympia Snowe (Maine), Pete Domenici (N.M.) and Richard Luger (Ind.) have publicly stated that the current policy toward Iraq is broken and that something other than a troop surge is needed to fix it.

It says something both good and bad about our political system that our leaders failed to lead on such an important issue until the voters in their districts told them what to do. Along with money, votes have a way of getting their attention like nothing else.

Despite the Senate’s Johnny-come-lately spine with the president, the war is an issue that has been front and center for average Americans for several years, and for good reason. Nearly every community in America has welcomed home a flag-draped coffin or a war hero in a wheelchair. When that started happening in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, average Americans began to take time from their flag-waving to ask the important questions about our goals in those conflicts. The same is true for the war in Iraq.

One of those Americans who is currently asking the tough questions is folk-rock-jazz musician Kristy Kruger. Last November her older brother, Lt. Col. Eric Kruger, was one of the highest-ranking officers to be killed in the Iraq War. After a period of inconsolable grief, Kristy decided to embark on a 50-state memorial tour in honor of her brother.

“If he loved this country that much, the best way that I could honor him would be to see and appreciate the whole thing, all of America,” explained Kruger. Proceeds from her tour are going to support Eric’s wife and four young children.

So far Kristy has played shows in California, Washington, Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Arizona, Oregon and Colorado. Her Modesto, California concert this month will be held in memory of that town’s Staff Sgt. Joseph Gage, a soldier killed by the same roadside bomb that took her brother’s life.

In addition to war opposition by family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, there is growing resentment among survivors of the war itself. Because of improvements in on-the-field medical techniques, this war is one where we are saving many of the badly injured soldiers who would have probably died in the jungles of Vietnam.

Estimates of U.S. war deaths in Iraq are over 3,500 but the number of wounded soldiers who have now returned to the states is estimated to be between 26,000 and 30,000. That’s a lot of Purple Hearts. And the injuries sustained in this war aren’t just your garden variety gunshot wound. Roadside bombs and suicide bombers have left Americans blind, deaf and have blown off their extremities in staggering numbers. Reports of inadequate treatment of the injured at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington have less to do with the standard of care at that facility than with the sheer volume of wounded men and women coming in the door.

For a sobering glimpse of what this war is doing to our military and military medical personnel, please rent the HBO documentary Baghdad ER. Filmed in 2006, the documentary is only about an hour long but will stay with you for days and days.

“We wanted to do this film because we think it’s important that Americans know what’s going on over in Iraq, the raw everyday activities,” said filmmaker Matt O’Neil who created Baghdad ER with Jon Alpert. “We decided we wanted to embed ourselves in a military hospital in Iraq to show the work of the doctors, and also the true cost of the war.”

Added Alpert, “We went over there not so much to express our own opinions, but trying to figure out how we could hold a mirror up to what was going on and reflect that back to the United States.”

Filmed over two months at a number of Combat Support Hospitals (CaSH) in Iraq, Baghdad ER tells a story that average Americans are finding out about much sooner than their elected representatives in Washington.