DIED Unlike many other young Marines, Lance Corporal William Allen, 26, who appeared on TIME’s cover in 2005, joined the military the day before 9/11. But like many who have fought in Iraq, Allen suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. He died of a drug overdose after self-medicating.
I didn’t know Lance Corporal Allen, but I have his photograph — this photograph, from one of Michael’s cover stories — in my home, so today when I saw it again in this week’s Time, along with the brief, sad paragraph noting his passing, it pulled me up short.
Like so many Americans, I have no family members serving in these wars. I have not been asked by my government to make sacrifices to aid the troops. If it hadn’t been for a certain Aussie war journo, my entire awareness of Iraq would have been limited to the occasional 5-minute blurb on the evening news and some not-fully-informed rants against the falsehoods that led us into the war.
Thanks to my family’s military history, I would always — always — have supported the troops. But that is just a phrase, a counterpoint of patriotism, a vague acknowledgment of the need for brave men and women to defend not only this country but the helpless, bullied peoples of the world that we can no longer bear to ignore.
We failed our military in these wars. That isn’t even debatable any longer. But again, it’s one thing to say it and another to have a loved one come home and silently suffer from the images that won’t leave, the memories that sear, the knowledge that so many of their buddies have not made it home, that so many innocent families could not be protected, that so much remains to be done.
The ripples of the failure of our civilian leadership will wash across the globe for decades. But the personal agonies are playing out in quiet suburban houses and urban apartments; in broken marriages and broken homes and broken lives that must, somehow, be added to the cost of these wars. I don’t know how to tally those up; yet somehow we must.
And somehow, we must make sure that future administrations never make these same mistakes and misjudgements again. We owe that to all those who lost their lives, whether on the battlefield or in the dark painful memories they could not escape.
To the family of Lance Corporal William Allen and all the other families who grieve, although it is so woefully inadequate and although they will never hear me, I would like to say: I am so very sorry for your loss.
