HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR: It’s that time of year again, when we remember that the United States dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan.

Shadows were burnt onto the walls.

Everything you know about your city–everything you love: Imagine that destroyed. I’m picturing the rose-colored triceratops on the Mall. I’m picturing the row houses on South Capitol Street. I’m picturing the Brotherhood Barber Shop, the three outlets of my favorite Salvadoran restaurant chain (El Tamarindo/Casa Fiesta), the little Brookland valley where it seems like every building is an outpost of the Catholic church, the quiet northwestern neighborhood where I grew up (Walter Reed, if that helps; or, Alaska and 16th Street–in wartime the helicopters wick-wick-wick overhead taking soldiers to the soldiers’ hospital), the Black Cat, Ben’s Chili Bowl, the purple gorse flowering where the concrete strips divided 16th Street, the deer and the raccoons and the rats and the blackbirds.

Imagine all that gone. You will never go home again.

Jus in bello.

I do believe that the use of atomic weapons was deeply unjust, terribly unjust. I don’t believe that evil makes World War II evil. Perhaps similarly, I believe the US has moved away from the rules and controls that were meant to prevent our soldiers from committing acts of terrible cruelty; and because, in the absence of rules, people behave as if no God watches us, our soldiers have committed acts of great cruelty. I don’t believe that makes the war in Afghanistan or in Iraq unjust. I don’t believe, actually, that we had anything remotely resembling an “option” in the Iraq war–I think the language of “a war of choice” is stupid. I can elaborate on that if people want. But that isn’t the important thing to me. [ETA: OK, so this entire post was written at a high tide of passion and a very low ebb of reason. I’ve considered deleting the whole thing and just linking to the atomic survivors’ sites. Ultimately decided that would be weaselly. But these lines, on Iraq, are the parts I find most overstated. I’m not sure I should have brought up the subject at all, since my claim about Iraq is a prudential one in a post primarily about moral and even anti-prudential claims; even if I had brought it up, I should have said something more like, “The status quo was untenable, and all the US options excruciating.” That’s what I believe; the “‘war of choice’ is stupid” language is overstated and misleading. Sorry….]

I was raised in a world where you don’t have to know soldiers unless you want to. It’s shocking to me that I know a man in Afghanistan, a young man in Iraq, a man who has returned (thank God) from both countries, a man and a woman who are trying to get posts in both countries, and a man who is likely to end up in Iraq.

I am ashamed–truly, deeply–to say that I have consistently been astonished by the goodness and thoughtfulness of these members of the American military. I never understood that you were normal, and my environment was not.

I only ask two things from the US military: I want you to protect people like me, who huddle behind the spear-tipped walls.
But more importantly, I want you to fight in a way I can support.

That’s why I support the congressional bills seeking greater oversight of the military: not because I want the Dilbert bureaucracy to extend itself into the war zone, but because words have meaning, words shape ideals, and if we say we won’t torture that makes it at least a little more likely that we really won’t–anymore.

The first time I ever sang “God Bless America,” it was outside an abortion clinic. Please–I know my country is in no way the standard of morality–but please, help us reach the point where “God Bless America” is not the desperate plea of the attorney who knows his client is guilty. I have never yet lived in a good country. I think I’d like to.

Because I really believe that the United States is not “the last, best hope of mankind.” I really believe it is the only current temporal hope of mankind. If we are not worth emulating, no one is.