Knowing Just Got Harder

In the months that have passed since Tommi’s deployment to Iraq, I have learned how to read the news faster and better than I did before. I have learned to read electronically, to read RSS feeds through online aggregators like bloglines, and to appreciate the various watchers who collect, synthesize, and engage difficult issues circling around the topics of war and the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Months of learning are bringing me to a new place now: each next story seems to raise in me a recurrent response. “Enough now,” I think to myself. “I don’t want to know.”

I don’t want to know that:

1. after more than 1,700 dead and 13,000 wounded American lives have been spent, the insurgency is gaining strength
2. the defense department is now working with a marketing firm to create a data base of high school and college age students most likely to enlist – that they have the wherewithal to access email records, records of academic achievement, and ethnicity to assist in targeting potential recruits
3. that a congressional call for definitive U.S. military planning in Iraq is flatly resisted by this administration as too likely to enforce enemy strategies
4. that rhetorical battles for “the high ground” can change the devastation of 9/11 into a bitter partisan game and change the Iraq/Afghanistan theater of war into “southwest Asia” to appease “politically sensitive international relations” when a U.S. pilot dies in a plane crash on the wrong side of a border
5. that the bombs lacing the roadways of Iraq are getting smarter with every passing day, and that equipment that should protect our soldiers isn’t safe enough now
   

I especially don’t want to know that another company of Minnesota National Guard men and women have just been put on alert for deployment. Those in Charlie Company not already trained as infantry will likely be retrained as military police and qualified for deployment along with others of their company. I don’t want to know. I just don’t want there to be more to know.

My son is presently a cook for Charlie Company.

Knowing just got harder to do.