More on 9/11

Below is an excerpt from my journal entry a week after 9/11.

Tuesday, 18 September 2001

I don't want my son to go to war. He's nine years old still, and while he has developed strong interests in weapons and war, I know he fears the reality behind his games. His fears are my fears too, fears both childish and mature at once.

I don't want my son to go to war. Okay, since when do we send nine-year-olds into battle? Others do that, but we don't. I'm thinking of two things here. First, my son's imagination will draw him into the war, in spite of his nine years. The war will appear in the television he watches, the movies and video games, conversations with his mother and me and with his friends and with God. War will be in the air from now till who knows when, and he will go to it at nine, ten, eleven and beyond. Second, given the kind of war this must be, it will continue till he's old enough to choose or be made to go. I don't want to seem him faced with the choice or the command.

But he will be faced with one or the other if he lives to the ripe old age of eighteen. I guess what I really fear is what that event—his going to war—will do to me. I can say I'll be proud, I think. I can say I'll be afraid. I'll probably be both and more. More, certainly. I'll be confused. I'll feel regret for yelling at him to go to sleep when I had work to do at night. I'll feel sad that my bright boy must offer his life for an ignorant world—hmm, that sounds familiar. I'll feel anger at the injustice of it, that my son should be taken from me to fight in a war based largely on ignorance and prejudice—theirs and ours.

Okay, so where was the justice in the deaths of those wanting only to fly to the West Coast? Where was the justice in the deaths of those just going to work—sitting behind a desk, going masked into a burning avalanche of steel and glass and desks and people? Can my son be an instrument of justice in a world that seems without
justice?

I don't want my son to go to war. But he will go to war, and I will pray every night he's gone that he'll come home safely.

Maybe I'd better start getting my knees—and heart and mind—in shape for that now.