To the North of Sackets lies Watertown, the commercial tie-in to Fort Drum Army Base. Fort Drum houses the 10th Mountain Division, which is a majority of the guys and girls trained for urban combat. Drum's been a pretty prominent feature in the area for years now, with many businesses relying on the military personnel as a main source of revenue. I'd always liked the area, in retrospect. The soldiers were crazy and shallow at times, but what large group of people isn't? They were alive, that's for sure. Those guys sure know how to raise hell.

I did my first two years at a small community college in Watertown, and I can clearly remember sitting in Intro Bio with Dr. Mark Fenlon when the planes hit. Needless to say, there was a cancellation of classes and rampant breakdowns.

The biggest thing I can remember from that day was my lone reaction to it. Everyone was crying or in shock...grieving, I guess. Not I; I was just angry.

It wasn't just your typical teen angst, I was angry at the situation. Why did no one in the entire country know what the hell was going on? Why was our President sitting in a classroom reading "My Pet Goat" after hearing it happened? We all learned that gem at a later date. Most of all, I was angry at the people around me. Of every single person I ran into that day, I was the only who wanted to know what would make people go to such extremes.

No one wanted to talk about it. It was nothing but a general outpouring of emotion, blindly directed at anyone who looked sympathetic. I stood alone, awash in a sea of grief, and the only thing going through my mind was, "What the hell did we do to set us on this path?"

Because we had to have done something. No one, even as crazy as Al Qaeda clearly is, would spend that much time, effort, and resources to blindside a superpower for no reason. Doing so means severe retaliation if the superpower survives. One would have to have a damn good reason to put it all on the line like that. No one I met in Watertown that day seemed to care what that reason was. I'd go so far to say that a good many people still don't care.

We were attacked, and what else did we have to do but retaliate? The primordial instinct of Pearl Harbor-esque revenge reared it's head soon after the shock had worn off the nation.

But there were no Japanese. There was no Japan, there were no Axis forces to blame. There were merely rumors of a shadowy terrorist underground which now it's easy to see we know very little about. If we really knew about them, we'd have caught them all by now.

With no one concrete to blame for this, Watertown and the nation seethed. It became dangerous to speak against the government, a guy could seriously get his ass beat if you did back then. For once in the time I lived with them, I had to shut up and let my grandfather rail away on his Conservative views unchallenged. To voice a contrary opinion was not wise at all in October or November, though have them I did.

As predicted, redirection proved to be the White House's way of dealing with a shadow enemy. America needs someone to blindly hate, and who do we hate more than Saddam Hussein? The sell was an easy one, with so-called anti-war Democrats buckling under pressure to authorize the war.

What's amusing is that Al Qaeda and Hussein were severely at odds with each other. No Iraqi had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. No Iraqi had killed a U.S. citizen until our troops went back in. In short, this explosion of hatred towards Americans is a direct product of the conflict we instigated.

Prior to invasion, we the United States had always been just another nation in the U.N. embargo. Sure, they disliked our role then, but there was no outright hatred of us. Iraq had invaded a sovereign ally of ours, to many our response in the first Gulf War was easily predictable. Hell, it was expected.

This current war is very very different. It is an invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation. This was an invasion that almost NO ONE in Watertown questioned. About the start of it was when all the flag stickers, the "These Colors Don't Run" crap, you name it, caught on. But the vast majority of Watertown, and I'm betting the nation, still didn't know WHO we weren't supposed to run from. It would make you want to jump off a cliff if you knew how many Americans still believe the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Now I'm decidedly against the war, but that's irrelevant. What is not an opinion is that many of our soldiers are over there dying even as I write this. Iraqi civilians have died by the thousands from stray or purposed attacks from both sides in the fighting. Iraq is less stable and more volatile than it ever was under Saddam's rule. Those are facts, you cannot refute them.

This war's changed us. Much like Vietnam, the popular opinion shifted, albeit much quicker this time. The comparisons to Pearl Harbor suddenly started being replaced with comparisons to Viet Cong isurgencies, a memory not many Americans are proud of at all. Failing to recieve U.N. approval to invade Iraq, we had gone in with a few allies. Those allies are now pulling out, and the effects their loss will have are not hard to predict.

I'd have to say the single-most telling thing of it all was learning that a great guy I knew, Mr. Leon James, was killed in a bombing in Iraq. Leon was an Army officer working on peaceful negotiations between factions, he was one of the good guys. But roadside bombs don't care who's a good guy, do they. Leon's survived by his wife and three daughters, the youngest who I don't think will remember much firsthand about her father.

Another guy I ran into, Major Walter Jacobs, an old teacher from high school, was being called up to serve another consecutive tour overseas. This was the same guy who'd told us in school that the Reserves were a great way to earn extra cash and stay in the local area. I really felt bad for him, as his distress at serving another in a seemingly endless string of tours was plain to see. Major Jacobs is a mechanic, and those're the guys who don't usually get sent home. How can you fight a war if there's no one to fix your engines of destruction?

Watertown was pretty somber last time I was there visiting. Having moved to South Dakota for school, there were a lot of new buildings and such that'd gone up in my absence. Most of the troops were gone on deployment, though a few thousand came home while I was there.

They weren't the same crazy yahoos I remembered. A lot of the guys I saw were really quiet; they just sat there with a few other soldiers or their girls talking among each other. There was no loud laughter, no aggravating mall security, and no ogling women. Most of these guys just looked disillusioned and tired.

I couldn't help but remember some random quote I heard, probably on some TV show. "I went to war for my country, but when the war was finished there was no country for me to come back to."

Iraq's changed these guys, and I seriously doubt it's for the better. Were it up to me, I'd bring them all home tomorrow. I grew up around these soldiers you see dying on the news. I count a good many of them as friends, people I'd help out of a jam. They are good guys, by and large, most of them don't have a mean bone in their bodies.

I don't know what combat's like, but if it's anything like my sociology teacher, Mr. Dean Anthony, was describing to us, then they're not going to come home the same. He still has nightmares of losing his entire Ranger patrol in a Viet Cong ambush. War kills a little in everyone involved, even the survivors.

Watertown's going to die a little bit with them, these young men and women. Even so removed, we'll all feel the ripples on the pond.

Two paths diverged in the forest, and I fear that we as Americans have taken the one we traveled just a few decades before. The path a lot of good people don't come back from.

Our nation is, again, losing something it can never regain. I don't know if we'll ever see that it's not something we can afford to lose.

*****

If you found this story interesting, you may also be interested in:
Remembering 9/11 [1]
Traveling In The Age Of Terror [2]
The Dive [3]