Column: War's price

Like many Duke students, I spent this past weekend glued to the television or my computer, watching basketball game after basketball game and filling in the scores on my bracket. I sat through three hours of a fantasy baseball draft, and somehow managed to watch the entire Academy Awards show. I worried about finding a summer job, and even squeezed in a little work.

It was almost enough to make me forget that, as I sat in my air-conditioned dorm at Duke University, thousands of miles away people were dying. Unfortunately, Dan Rather kept cutting in, telling me which obscure desert city had now been overtaken, then cutting out again to let me get back to my game. Then the updates changed - a dozen Marines killed. Ten Americans missing. Over 50 soldiers wounded. I knew we were supposed to expect casualties, but this many? This soon?

When you think "anti-war," I am not what you think of. I have never attended a peace rally. I do not wear armbands or lecture my friends about sanctions. I have never uttered the phrase "no blood for oil." Unlike some others on the left, I really do care about the well-being of American soldiers in combat, and do believe that they need our support.

But I have to wonder if the people who are unwaveringly pro-war have thought about the other side of the coin. As they sit in their comfortable rooms and watch Joan Rivers, it's a lot easier to frown on doubters than if they were laying their own lives on the line. Of course I do not deny my own culpability. Duke was routing its second-round opponent in a basketball game that we could win or lose without consequence on human life, and I was groaning about Dan Rather breaking in to tell me the names of men who had died because the president had told them to.

My dad often rags on me for not knowing famous works of literature, but one I am familiar with is Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" - a historical poem that raises interesting questions about the present situation. As the poem's brigade rides into battle, it's revealed that an error has been made and they are more vulnerable than they thought, but they ride on anyway. "Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die," the poem reads, going on to note the serious casualties incurred by the brave cavalry.

No, it is not for the military to reason why. But the reason must lie somewhere, and the decision, based on costs and benefits, to send Americans (and Iraqis) to their deaths must be constantly reevaluated. What price is too high for such a questionable benefit? A hundred soldiers? We may have lost that many by the end of the week. Two hundred? A thousand? How many relatives must be consoled that their sacrifice really was in the best interest of world peace? At what point will the price be too high for the two Duke students who sent out an e-mail exhorting classmates to "support our troops" and, in effect, to stop whining about death, starvation,and other such unpleasant things?

Leaving questions of free speech aside, to say that now is the time to shut up and rally behind the troops is so irresponsible that, ironically, I have to question the idea that these people really care about our military men and women at all. Who, by the time Richard Nixon moved to bring American soldiers home from Vietnam, really thought it was best to "support our troops" by silencing concerns about costs and benefits? It is precisely at this point that we need to examine and reexamine our reasons for doing what we're doing. In muting our concerns and blindly following the opinions of one or two men, we do a disservice to every single person that needlessly suffers because of this war. In constantly discussing where we have come from and where we need to go, we ensure that the noblest goals can be achieved with the least loss of life.