Originally, I was going to write a long, articulate post, addressing Veteran's Day.  In the shower, I plotted, point by point, all of the great and weighty things I would say about service and sacrifice. 

Now, sitting here at my desk, nearing the end of my workday, I am setting those things aside so that I may say the one thing to those vets that actually matters:

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Gen. Colin Powell (Ret.), while endorsing Senator Obama for President:

I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America. I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards -- Purple Heart, Bronze Star -- showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross; it didn't have the Star of David; it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.

The main-stream media tolerance of anti-Arab/Muslim racism has been gnawing at me for a few weeks now.  Regardless of any politics or endorsements, I'm glad that General Powell chose to point out this egregious double-standard. 

Four years ago, I set out on a journey. Haunted by word that my little brother was soon to ship out to Iraq, and troubled by personal misgivings regarding the war, I began to obsessively watch for reports of Americans killed in action. At that point in the war, the evening news featured frequent KIA reports, showing portraits and photographs of the soldiers most recently lost. As they faded from picture to picture, I searched the faces, looking (I thought) for old ROTC friends and acquaintances. In reality, I was seeking something else. Slowly, I came to the horrifying realization that I was looking for some sign of my brother in the faces of the dead.

What I found, instead, was an intangible thread, a commonality that I could not quantify. Was is the set of their jaws, or perhaps the grim determination in each gaze? There was something terrifyingly familiar, yet out of intellectual reach. My father joined the Marine Corps when I was a child, thus I spent a good deal of time living on military installations. I wondered if that time, spent among soldiers and their families, had colored my perception of these faces.

I knew that, in order to settle my mind, I would have to find a way to quantify (or at least identify) the thing I was seeing/sensing. So I looked up the names of all of the American soldiers killed in Iraq at that point. The next month was spent researching that list, scouring the internet to find as many photographs as possible (this was an incredibly intense and painful experience). Next, I wrote custom software that would allow me to composite and find the average from hundreds or thousands of images. The initial outcome was compelling, but unsatisfactory.

I waited a few weeks, but found that my mind was still overwhelmed by the vague connection I was seeing between the individual faces. So I revised my process, went back through the photos and aligned the eyes and mouth of each soldier's face, individually, and re-composited them.

The result left me, quite literally, in tears. I was confronted by a face, unknown to me yet achingly familiar. It was a perfect, visual representation of that commonality that had seemed so intangible to me. This is the image you see at the top of this post, The Known Soldier: the face of our ongoing sacrifice, the price of our nation's hubris.

At the time, I intended to go back and update the image with the fallen soldiers from each year that the war continued. With great shame I admit that I have failed, the burden is just too painful.

I figured Memorial Day was a good time to finally put that all in writing.