The names are Isabella Gonzales and Tyler James Feehan. Private Gonzales, nineteen years old, from Carrollton, Texas. First Lieutenant Feehan, twenty-five, from Ewa Beach, Hawaii. They are dead this week in Jordan, killed by an Iranian strike on a military base, and the President says this is “a very sad thing.”
Well, it is. But sadness is a cheap currency in a war that did not need to be fought.
Here is what we know: Private Gonzales was assigned to the 10th Army Air Missile Defense Command in Germany. Lieutenant Feehan served with the 32nd Army Air Missile Defense Command at Fort Bragg.
They were young. They had families. They had futures. They had, in the way of all young soldiers, the belief that their country would not send them into harm’s way without good reason. That belief, like so many others, has proven to be a fragile thing.
The President initiated this unprovoked, war on February 28, and in the months since, seventeen American service members have been killed.
Seventeen. That is not a number to be recited in a press briefing and moved past. That is seventeen families who will never be whole again.
That is seventeen young men and women who will not come home to see their parents, their children, their friends. That is seventeen futures erased because someone in Washington decided that a war with Iran was a good idea.
And for what? The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Gas prices are at four dollars a gallon. Oil tankers are exploding in the Persian Gulf.
The Houthis have announced a blockade on Red Sea shipping, which will reduce global oil supply by seven percent. The Iranians are striking American facilities in Kuwait and Bahrain. The whole region is aflame, and the American people are paying for it at the pump and in blood.
But here is the part that should make every American pause: the ceasefire was working.
Before the President decided to resume hostilities, there was hope. The Strait of Hormuz might have reopened.
Diplomacy, that unfashionable word, was making progress. And then, as if the whole enterprise of war had become a habit that could not be broken, the bombs started falling again.
Night after night. Nine consecutive nights of American strikes before the Iranians hit back in Jordan. And now we have Isabella and Tyler.
The Pentagon says their remains were found at the base. The Pentagon says a third person was also killed.
The Pentagon says these things in that peculiar bureaucratic language that seems designed to distance the listener from the reality of what is being said. But there is no distancing that can be done. These were human beings. They were someone’s children. They were someone’s hope. And they are gone.
The President called their deaths “a very sad thing.” And perhaps it is unkind to expect more from a man who has shown little capacity for genuine grief.
Elections that put an immoral moron like Trump in the White House are sad.
But the American people deserve more than sadness. They deserve an explanation. They deserve to know why their sons and daughters are dying in a war that did not need to happen.
They deserve to know why a ceasefire was abandoned, why diplomacy was cast aside, why the Strait of Hormuz is closed and gas prices are rising and the Middle East is burning.
But no explanation will come. Not really. There will be more strikes. There will be more retaliations. There will be more names added to the list, more families shattered, more young Americans buried in Arlington. And the President will continue to say that this is “a very sad thing,” as if sadness were a sufficient response to the tragedy he has wrought.
Private Gonzales and Lieutenant Feehan are dead. They are dead because their country decided, in its infinite wisdom, that war was preferable to peace. They are dead because the President believed that striking Iran was a better option than talking to Iran. They are dead because the machinery of war, once set in motion, is very difficult to stop.
The rest of us will go on. We will go to work. We will pay our four-dollar gas. We will read the headlines and shake our heads and perhaps offer a brief prayer for the fallen. And then we will move on, because that is what we do. But somewhere in Texas, a mother is weeping for her nineteen-year-old daughter. Somewhere in Hawaii, a father is trying to make sense of the death of his twenty-five-year-old son. And somewhere in Washington, the President is calling this “a very sad thing.”
It is sad. But sadness is not enough. It never has been.