The Cost Of War

May 22, 2006 Memorial Day: The Cost of War by: Anthony Everett
I did not know Lt. Robert Seidel of the United States Army personally, but I
know the young man who, for three years, was his roommate at West Point.
Roommate at West Point is something a little different than your beer-drinking,
girl-chasing frat brother at most colleges and universities. At West Point, he is
the first person with whom you go to war. The war you fight at West Point is
survival. It is perhaps the most rigorous academic and military training in the
world condensed into a four year frenzy in which the Academy breaks you so they
can remake you into an elite soldier and officer. As a student you are fighting
wars on all fronts: academic, athletic, social, and psychological. Plenty of kids
can't hack it, plenty of kids wash out or walk away. Lt. Socrates Rosenfeld would
tell you that Lt. Seidel was the person who got him through those battles. Lt. Seidel
would say the same of Rosenfeld. Having survived West Point together, there is a
bond that forever commits them to each other's welfare. After graduation,
Rosenfeld went off to flight school at Fort Rucker in Alabama. He now flies the
Army's fiercest aerial weapon, the Apache Longbow helicopter. Seidel went off to
earn his Ranger, Airborne, and Air Assault badges before heading to Iraq. And
that is where he died - 23 years old, killed by a roadside bomb while riding in
a Humvee which the Army can't seem to equip with enough armor to protect its
soldiers. Humvees in Iraq might as well have targets on them. They might as well
be coffins. To be fair, the Army has strengthened the armor on Humvees, but
insurgents in Iraq are making stronger IED's (improvised explosive devices) that
have now killed more soldiers in Humvees this year, than during the same period
last year. And thus it was that Lt. Robert Seidel paid the ultimate price for his
country. It is a price paid from many accounts. Seidel's death, or that of any
soldier, exacts a price from his family, his friends, his unit. It exacts a price from
his roommate, Lt. Rosenfeld, who was speechless at the news. Farewell my friend,
farewell the invincibility of youth. The billions of dollars spent on the war will
eventually be recouped. Robert Seidel will never come back. Nor, in a crass
accounting, will the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Army spent educating,
feeding, and training an elite officer like Seidel. If there is any comfort here it
comes in the brave words Seidel said to his mother before going to Iraq. He said,
"if something happens to me, don't be mad and don't be angry. I will have died
doing what I love to do." Few people can or would say that. And in that context,
the debt we owe can't be measured in a ledger, the debt we owe is to U.S. Army
1st Lt. Robert Seidel.