I wrote about the child above 16 years ago. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Since then the wars have created more dead and injured. Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Gaza is a wasteland just so we can move on to Iran. More with PTSD and more children forever scarred by the adults who are supposed to care.
No one questions the heroism of the men and women sent to war. They are doing their duty where their country sends them. At some point we have to ask, when do we stop sending them? There will be thousands of men and women receiving medical care for their injuries for decades, and there will be a lot more for whom the battle never ends.
None of those numbers indicates the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan, Israeli and Palestinian citizens who have lost their lives or been wounded by the conflicts in their nation. Seeing a child such as the one above always reminds me of W. H. Auden’s “Shield of Achilles” and it’s closing lines about the shield created by the armorer to the gods for Thetis to give to her son Achilles in the Trojan War.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestus, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
