Microscopes and Spreadsheets

I noticed the other day that flags in my community were flying at half mast, and wondered why. I checked The New York Times, where I learned that a NYC firefighter had died in Iraq. (The city tabloids milked his death for several days' worth of screaming headlines and sobbing family photos. Not surprisingly: even before 9/11 firefighters were special here. When three of them died in a hardware store fire in Astoria, their pictures were all over city and suburbs for weeks, and collections for their families were made everywhere.) The Times story mentions that a New Jersey firefighter died the same day in a separate incident in Iraq, and another NYC firefighter was injured.

None of these men came from my community. (And if we lowered flags here every time someone from somewhere else died in Iraq, well, we wouldn't ever raise them.) So I checked Newsday, the Long Island paper, where I learned that the same car bomb that killed the NYC firefighter also took the life of Will Urbina, a 29-year-old volunteer firefighter from my community.

So we can calculate from these two newspaper accounts that the death toll among firefighters from our area for that one day was at least three. No idea what the casualties among other professions and regions might have been.

Back in the days of the Vietnam War, every day news outlets reported that day's number of dead and injured American soldiers. (We were also allowed to see photos of the coffins; between a president, a senator, a civil rights activist, three astronauts and all the Vietnam dead, the dominant image of my childhood is of flag-draped coffins.) It got so routine that the numbers became almost meaningless to most people. They were just numbers. Vast, mounting numbers.

Today we've gone to the opposite extreme. Embedded reporters give us an up-close-and-personal view of war, and newspapers (and presumably TV, although I can't say, because I seldom watch TV news) give us the local story of individuals who have died. But we've lost as much perspective by that microscopic view of the war as we did in the Vietnam era by the big-picture spreadsheet version. During the Vietnam era, the deaths were just part of an anonymous calculus (until they touched your own family). Today each death is localized, the business of its community, but largely unnoticed for its part in the growing cost in lives to our nation.

I wish we could find the place in between, in which the individuals can be mourned in their community, but we never forget that more and more families, more and more communities, are experiencing similar losses with every day that this war goes on.