This is why we fight

Today's NY Times Magazine has a series of truly depressing photographs taken by Ashley Gilbertson. He is going around the country photographing the bedrooms of soldiers killed in our 21st century wars. It so happens that these soldiers are all young people, as young as 19, as old as 24. Here is the bedroom of Lt. Brian Bradshaw from a small town in Washington.

Why did he have to die now? What purpose was served?

Dexter Filkins has a brief, very poignant essay accompanying the photographs. You'll be crying after you read it. Here it is:

Just kids. You step into the barracks thinking big, burly and deep-voiced. And what you get are chubby faces and halfhearted mustaches and voices still cracking, boys hurried into uniforms and handed heavy guns. Sept. 11 was junior high, fifth grade even, a half a lifetime ago. Megan Fox is everywhere, plastered above the bunks, the best that Maxim can offer. Junk food, too, sent A.P.O. (Army Post Office) from home: powdered Gatorade and M&M’s and teriyaki jerky. Underwear and socks. “Love you, bro,” scrawled a sister from California on a care package to Ramadi, Iraq. “Muwah!”

Forty cigarettes and a 10-mile run. Ice cream and cake and 25 pull-ups. Who but a kid can punish himself like that? They go on patrol and search a string of houses, then lift weights to heavy metal and sleep away the heat in the afternoon. Their bodies are hard and soft at once, like youth.

Adulthood’s a switch. The kids climb into their Humvees and close the clanging doors. They push the clips into their M-4’s, pull back the bolts. Safeties off. Only code words and swear words now, no joshing around. Voices drop and eyes go hard. “Movement to contact,” someone says. It won’t be long now.

Death rides along. In the back seat, in the Humvee, on the bouncing road, in the dark. No one mentions the possibility of death. No one talks about the ambush coming. Nor the bomb in the road ahead, buried under the pile of trash, the one that will explode upward, through the seats.

“What’s that up there?” the driver said.

“Hell if I know, move your head,” said the other.

“It’s nothing,” the driver said.

In Helmand Province, in Afghanistan, the bombs were so big that one guy disappeared. He’d been on a foot patrol in a field. After a while they found his leg in a tree; they had to go up and pull it down. The rest of him didn’t turn up, so they spent the night in the same place and woke up the next morning and started searching again. He’d floated down a canal.

Sometimes, right after a guy is killed, you feel as if you are in possession of a terrible secret. He’s there on the ground, alive only a minute ago, and the only people who know he’s dead are standing right there by him. The rest of the world thinks he’s alive, as alive as he was when he climbed out of bed that same morning, only a few hours before.

And at that moment, you think about how the word of his death will travel; how it will depart Iraq or Afghanistan and move across the ocean and into the United States and into the town where he lives, Corinth, Miss., say, or Benwood, W.Va., and into the houses and the hearts of the people who love him most in the world. And at that moment, standing there, looking down on the dead man, you can wonder only what the family will do when the terrible news finally arrives, how they will resist it and wrestle with it and suffer from it, and how they will cope and how they will remember.