Veteran’s Day is a time to commemorate military service, to pay respects to those we’ve lost. But I remember my fallen hero at a different time. I have no choice. My best childhood friend was killed just days before my first child was born.
Every year I sink privately into a funk when we celebrate Joseph’s birthday. Itap a reminder of how long itap been, and what this world lost when he came into it. Over those twelve years, I’ve learned something about our country: We as a nation have no idea how to deal with our war dead.
Two weeks of political gamesmanship surrounding the presidentap phone call to the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson makes that clear. We treat our fallen soldiers, at once, as heroes, as family, as political ploys, as opportunities, and as entertainment.
I know from experience. I’ve been making people really uncomfortable ever since Taliban fighters killed Erik Kristensen, my best childhood friend, in Afghanistan in 2005.
Like other soldiers before and after, Erik ’s death became a strange, public spectacle.
To learn how he died, I had to read Lone Survivor, the bestselling account of . It culminates in the failed rescue mission that ended Erik’s life. With each flip of the page, I asked myself: Was this going to be the one — the one where Erik dies?
Things only got weirder. There was the bizarre conversation I had with a stranger. While boarding a flight to Washington, I spotted a woman reading Lone Survivor. I asked her if she liked the book. Without thinking, I announced: “My friend dies in that book … near the end.”
I swore I’d never to do it again. But I couldn’t stop myself from mentioning Erik to strangers when Hollywood turned Lone Survivor into a blockbuster. It came out a few years ago, but I still can’t watch it, not even on TV. I won’t stare at a glowing screen with gunfire and exploding choppers, waiting until just that moment when my childhood friend goes down in a fiery fury.
Audiences paid more than $150 million to see it. I torture myself thinking about what watching that film did to Erik’s parents. What does it say about our national life that we watch dramatic re-enactments of murdered kids for entertainment?
There was also the time I invited a Vietnam veteran to speak to a U.S. history class I was teaching. Like Erik, the vet had served in the special forces. He never talked about it. But there, before a cast of strange 18-year-olds, he shared his story for the first time. Somehow it came out that he, too, lost a friend in Afghanistan, on the very same mission. It was awkwardly personal and public. Is this how it is with war?
Then came the party killers. Someone might mention Afghanistan, and I’d volunteer that my friend was shot down in a helicopter. I’d say it matter-of-factly, like it was normal to share death over a glass of wine.
Unforgivably, it took me years to visit Erik’s parents. As a kid, I practically lived at their house, playing Star Wars and Legos and who knows what else. We were friends for decades. And still I let hundreds of weeks pass before I knocked on their front door to say I’m sorry, and that I miss Erik too.
When I finally showed up, I learned something about death. We make it sound like itap a special honor to be a Gold Star family. Itap not. It is torture and loss and pain. And it never goes away.
I apologized for not stopping by sooner. I didn’t know what to do. They understood. But I still haven’t mustered the courage to visit Erik’s grave site. When the Navy-Air Force football game featured a tribute to Erik a few weeks ago, I struggled to watch that too. I don’t like other people telling me what his life meant.
Maybe itap just harder to lose someone in war. Strangers dress them up for morality plays about duty and patriotism. They lecture us about how to pay respects to the dead. They gape at our war dead for entertainment. They use it for political combat.
Maybe death just brings the strange out of people. But I still wonder: does death in war make it that much stranger?
Kenneth Osgood is professor of History at Colorado School of Mines. He is the author or editor of five books, including Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad.
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