Katrina Jurn: When the war hits home

The least welcome guests at my father's funeral service were two National Honor Guards. These representatives of the United States government came to honor my father's drafted service in the Vietnam War.

The U.S. always remembers its veterans.

In the silence of that Florida church, the guards proceeded past the hundred or so mourners to the altar, folded an American flag and presented it to me. The only words I clearly remember them saying were, "On behalf of the President of the United States."

I couldn't get past those words.

My father was killed in Balad, Iraq Nov. 11, 2005 -- Veteran's Day.

Less than two months earlier, I was at the National Mall in Washington, with 80 other Penn students and 100,000 protesters.

There I saw a seemingly endless line of widows, mothers and sons carrying photographs of their deceased. I wouldn't have thought 2,000 pieces of paper would take so long to go by. While I had rejected the war's injustice from its beginning, it was only when I saw that endless procession that I realized its profound cost.

Like most Penn students, I had the luxury of distance. Though many enlistees are college-aged and theoretically our peers, they are not part of our circles, socioeconomically or socially. This is a war fought by the poor.

I may have protested the president and his unjust war from the start, but it was only when the guardsmen came to give Bush's condolences that it hit me personally. On behalf of the president, I thought. How ironic.

On behalf of the president who killed my father.

When news of my father spread, I was inundated with shocked condolences, e-mails and letters from faculty I had never even met. It felt like I was the first person anyone knew to lose a loved one in Iraq. For those who know me, my experience shattered the illusion of distance and brought the war close.

But for most of you, it still isn't close.

The American military death toll has become a daily routine, 2,290 today. And of the Iraqi and American civilian casualties there is barely any mention.

My father worked for Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Energy Services. Like many of us, he was against war, but his work took him to Iraq. As the government outsources more and more non-combat jobs to private companies, the number of dead civilians will only grow. As that happens, it becomes more and more likely that you will know someone like me, or join me. Each day, the numbers become real for somebody else.

When the Iraq war began March 20, 2003, Penn students and professors took action en masse. However, three years later, we hear little from either the student body or the faculty about the occupation. One might think we were convinced when Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003. One might think we'd missed the 2,131 deaths since that declaration.

But the war was not completed then, nor is it now.

Not only was the mission not accomplished in two months -- the death toll had only just begun to rise. Now, two years later, Iraq is in shambles, its ethnic and social strife acutely exacerbated by the United States occupation. The unilateral action of the American government has yet to see any support, save for a marginal sprinkling of troops from its "coalition" countries.

America is at war and already you are intimately involved. I am at war, and you are at war, and that should be enough to motivate us to act.

Our silence amounts to consent. As the violence continues, it is guaranteed to personally affect more and more of us -- if that's what it takes for you to care.

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