“I don’t have to hope he lives anymore.”
Awilda Cordero, delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the Bronx, said she did not like her husband anymore; in fact he is her ex-husband. But he is still in the Marines and she doesn’t want him in some big battle in Eastern Europe someplace.
“Somebody told me coming out here that he should be all right. We don’t fight where white guys are. Are they lying?”
“I don’t think so,” she was told. “Whoever told you that is as right as you can get.”
History since 1945 shows that the United States has not shot, shelled or bombed anybody white, except for some bombing in Eastern Europe as ordered by President Bill Clinton.
The Democrats are here for the start of a flat-out racial election. Simultaneously, we are in the sixth year of slaughter in Iraq. Delegates sit in an arena and face the great national weakness, race. At the same time, if we look at our record of carnage in other places and other times, we might think of taking race out of our wars. That could lead to something pretty good: If we don’t fight whites, we don’t fight anybody.
Once, we were killed by a group of 15 from Saudi Arabia, who flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Otherwise, our soldiers die fighting nonwhites away from the U.S.
First, there was Korea. We lost 36,516. There were 8,178 missing and 7,245 taken prisoner. There were 92,134 wounded. That word, wounded, always reads like an added thought in stories about casualties. Look up legs and genitals blown off.
In Vietnam, a great adventure, we lost 58,159 and 305,000 were wounded.
In Iraq, almost 4,150 American soldiers are dead and at least 30,324 wounded, as well as somewhere near 25,000 Iraqi troops dead and 100,000 civilians.
Apparently, nobody reads. Winston Churchill said:
“Iraq is an ungrateful volcano.”
Now American candidates say they must put troops into Afghanistan in order to make us safe.
One soldier was a private, Luis Morano, 19, who wanted to be a cop in the Bronx and died in Iraq. His fiancee, Jessica Corporan, 18, wanted to marry him and have a baby.
The sadness assembled in my heart and has not gone away. She is small and young. Her hair is dripping from the rainstorm outside, and she is standing in a church aisle alongside a box with a flag over it and the boy she was going to marry inside.
She walked weeping into the rain with the casket. It darkened the shoulders of her short cloth coat. She stood alone and watched the casket being put into a hearse. A general was standing with her boyfriend’s relatives. Jessica Corporan walked up to him with deliberate steps.
He had a hand out to console this girl.
She didn’t look at the hand. She looked at him with brown eyes that were afire.
“I want to ask you something,” Jessica Corporan said to the general.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Why is my boyfriend dead?”
She kept looking at that general with her burning brown eyes and waited for his answer to a question he could not answer and his country could not answer. He took a back step. She didn’t stop staring. He took another back step and another and he was gone.
Jessica Corporan was left in the rain with her dead boyfriend, a Latino dead in our latest American war of color.
Jimmy Breslin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist from New York City.
