News From the Cause

March 15, 2011

“An epidemic of disconnection.” That's how journalist and author Bob Woodward has described the increasing distance between the small community of military personnel who are bearing the burden of war and American society in general.

For a while, the flags on porches and magnetic ribbons on cars gave plausibility to the notion that, irrespective of whether Americans supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they supported the troops.

Those wars are now among the nation's longest, and the American people are tired. Not tired of the repeated deployments in which literally 99 percent of them have no part. They have tired of even thinking about war and its consequences for the men and women who have volunteered to serve.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did not remotely factor into the November elections. President Barack Obama gave them only a passing reference in his 62-minute State of the Union address in January. A February CBS News poll found a paltry 4 percent of respondents who thought the wars were the most important issue for the country. And that was before the public was distracted by an imperiled NFL season and a perverted obsession with Charlie Sheen.

Marine Lt. Gen. John Kelly lost his son, 2nd Lt. Robert Kelly, to a land mine in southern Afghanistan in November. Addressing a group of fellow Marines days later, he expressed his frustration at the epidemic of disconnection. “We are in a life-and-death struggle, but not the whole country,” the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe quoted him as saying. “One percent of Americans are touched by this war. Then there is a much smaller club of families who have given all.”

Army Col. David Sutherland is one of the 1 percenters. As commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team in Iraq's Diyala province, Sutherland committed to visit every seriously wounded soldier and pay respects to every dead soldier in his unit, an effort movingly documented by the New York Times in 2007.click here to view more

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