His Sacrifice Brings Distant War into Focus

The Boston Globe

He was 19 and his name was Shayne Cabino and he lived in my town and he was killed on Oct. 6 in Iraq, one of at least 1,965 members of the US military now dead since the war began.

Cabino's family, too distraught to talk, held a news conference at the Canton police station, where a friend read a statement saying that "Shayne wanted to make the world a better place" and that he "was extremely proud of the uniform he wore, and the fact that he was serving his country.”

Shayne Cabino was a tall, skinny boy who graduated from high school only 16 months ago, and who gave his life for his country on a roadside in Iraq. "An improvised explosive device" jerry-rigged to kill Americans exploded, killing him and three other young Marines, Nicholas Cherava, 21; Patrick Kenny, 20; and Jason Frye, 19.

A few words, a few prayers, a plaque somewhere for all of them.

And the beat goes on.

I remember being a child and learning in social studies that in ancient times young girls were often plucked out of their lives and burned on an altar to appease the gods. And I remember thinking how lucky I was that I didn't live in those days. 

Now I am old and I think, only the altar has changed. Kids are still being plucked out of their lives and sacrificed.

Forty years ago when the US was fighting in Vietnam, it seemed like every person in this country, young and old, was intellectually and emotionally involved. That war was on the front page every day and there was a body count on the news every night. That war was the focal point of our lives.

This war is like a radio playing in a distant room. Every now and then you walk by and you hear a few notes when a friend's son is deployed, when a colleague's sister returns home to her husband and children, when a boy you never met but who lived in your town is killed. And for a minute, maybe even a day, you stop and pay attention.

But then you walk on to the mall, to the movies, to a selectman's meeting where everyone is angry because someone wants to change the zoning laws and this isn't fair.

And it isn't. But more than unfair is that the rules of war changed in this country, and few people are yelling. The United States thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, so the United States bombed Iraq first. And began a war that has cost thousands of military and civilian lives.

Hurricane Katrina, which also captured the world's attention, exposed the underside of a superpower. All over the planet, people saw, live and in color, the inequalities of wealth and race in a country that myth had told them was paved with gold. They also saw our government fail.

It was cameras, not conscience, that embarrassed our government into action in New Orleans. 

The cameras are missing in Iraq. And missing from the funerals of the dead and from the hospitals where the living linger. And from the distant rooms of those whose sons and daughters and fathers and mothers aren't ever coming home.

Pop culture dominates our lives. Music. Movies. iPods. We shop. We worry about the price of oil. We watch "Lost," losing ourselves in TV because a fictional mystery is easier to think about than the real mystery and misery of war.

But in those distant rooms, where you hear crying sometimes, the war is real. The cameras, which capture the images that move and motivate us, are somewhere else.

And so are we.