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thedrifter
11-22-07, 03:52 AM
A Thanksgiving of unequal sacrifice

WASHINGTON — You would think that in a season of thanks Americans would share gratitude for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, especially when war-time sacrifices are as unequal as any time in our history.

Presidential candidates walk a tightrope by praising the troops before criticizing the war. This may be one Vietnam lesson that still holds: that soldiers don't make policy and don't deserve to be spat upon, cursed or shunned when they return from unpopular wars.

But the praise is not that simple, as we have learned in Iraq.

In a Thanksgiving column three years ago, I wrote of the gratitude owed to the tens of thousands of Americans who volunteer to serve in the military. It was based on an assumption that an act of selflessness in an era of self-indulgence was one of the few things that could not be politicized in a divided America.

The nasty-grams from some readers were startling. The printable ones could be summarized thusly: I was a naive warmonger, a shill for the military industrial complex, a panderer to a warrior class whose very existence was dangerous. Furthermore, journalists should have stopped the war before it began, and praising the troops only compounded that failure.

It was an epiphany, a realization that we must add a military service gap to the race and generation and class and income and culture gaps that our politicians like to talk about and frequently exploit.

This chasm was inevitable in a society that is now 35 years into an all-volunteer military, but whose global commitments and military expenditures have not diminished. Each passing day separates Americans with real-life connections to the uniform from the growing ranks of those whose connections are fading, like old photographs of the boys of Antietam, Normandy or Ia Drang.

We saw a measure of this division in September, when MoveOn.org Political Action attacked the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, as "General Betray Us" on the eve of his testimony before Congress. The news out of Iraq, on the battlefield at least, is getting better. If a measure of political progress accompanies it in 2008, this ad could turn out to be one of the biggest political blunders of the 2008 campaign.

On this, the fifth Iraq Thanksgiving, some soldiers, sailors, Marines, Air Force and National Guard personnel are in second or third tours of Iraq or Afghanistan. Their families and communities feel their absences, and there is no end in sight.

By the fifth Thanksgiving after Pearl Harbor the Greatest Generation's soldiers were trading in their uniforms for the GI Bill and the baby boom. The draft had ensured that every American community was touched. The home front had been united behind Rosie the Riveter and Victory Gardens, had shared the sacrifice of rationed gas, rubber, sugar, had been resolved to fashion without nylon and Fridays without meat. The soldiers came from every block, from every church and synagogue, from all walks of life. It was total, complete and unremitting war, but by the fifth Thanksgiving after Pearl Harbor, peace had come.

Today, most Americans' connection to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are through headlines or political diatribe. Sacrifice is $3.10-a-gallon gas or long airport security lines. In times like these, with a war dividing the country, the selflessness of those who serve is more worthy of thanksgiving than ever.

Ellie