After a decade of war in Iraq, our troops are coming home. Now we must decide how to memorialize the Iraq War - in other words, how to write history.
Will history read that America accomplished President Bush's goal of "spreading democracy?"
Will history read that the Iraq War triggered a deadly new cycle of mistrust and retaliation in a world determined to destroy itself?
Or might there be another history of this war?
As all histories, this one will influence the decisions of future generations.
In 2006, President Bush addressed the American Legion regarding our enemy in Iraq: "We will prevail." He concluded with the familiar prayer: "God bless the United States of America." But before we utter "mission accomplished" again, before we thank God for our victory, before we frame this war's narrative, we should pause. Perhaps the declaration of victory carries within it a frightening truth.
In his story, "The War Prayer," Mark Twain describes a congregation that prayed during wartime. "In every breast," he writes, "burned the holy fire of patriotism." The pastor beseeched God to crush their enemy as they achieved nothing less than victory.
Then God's messenger arrived with a warning: God would grant their prayer if they still desired it after the messenger explained its import. "For it is like many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware." When men pray one prayer, the messenger said, God in His wisdom hears two, "one uttered, the other not."
Then he put into words the unspoken prayer: "O Lord, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us drown the thunder of guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.
"Help us lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. We ask it of Him Who is the Source of Love."
The congregation fell silent.
When we thank God for answering our war prayers, when we write the history of our victory in Iraq, as we surely will, I hope we remember what it cost our country to achieve it: more than 5,000 U.S. military deaths; more than 30,000 military wounded; at least 2,000 military suicides. I hope we remember the 160,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the countless Iraqi civilians wounded.
We still have time to pause and think before we write the history that our grandchildren's children will read - a history that will influence their decisions. We still have time to warn them that God hears two prayers in every prayer we utter - and that our enemies pray, too.
• Marilee Swirczek lives and works in Carson City.
