Human feeling and competency

I don't know lots about a lot. One worthwhile thing Sec'y Rumsfeld said was "We don't know what we don't know." I just wish he believed it.

In a longish column in Booman Tribune, detailing an exchange of messages between war correspondent Joe Galloway and Rumsfeld's press secretary, Larry DiRita, we read these moving words from Galloway's personal experience on the Iraqi battlefield:

i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, "You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don't quit now..."

Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty. i could wish for so much. i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time. i could wish that Jackson's widow Betsy had not found, among the possessions of her late husband, a copy of my book, carefully earmarked at a chapter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was reading at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her husband, herself and a 3 year old baby girl.

those things i received in the mail yesterday and they brought back the tears that i wept standing there in that pit, feeling the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen american soldier 41 years ago on a barren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war. someone once asked me if i had learned anything from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry.

What else can be said? There is much more of conventional "substance" in the column, and it's worth reading, but these words near the end underline why any of it is worth paying attention to at all.

Centuries ago, the prophet Jeremiah said of the national leaders he was criticizing that they had so little sense of shame at their wrongdoing that "they did not know how to blush." (Jeremiah 6:15) Sounds like those who pass for leaders in this nation could start by learning to how to weep at human suffering-- at home or abroad, civilian or military, American or Iraqi (or Mexican). Lacking human feeling and compassion, they cannot be competent to lead this nation; they can only serve a culture and an empire of death.