Local news

One of the things that’s really different about living in Savannah is that it’s not unusual to see uniformed soldiers — at the grocery store, the Best Buy, in the next car over on the street, whatever — just going about their off-hours business. There are big military bases nearby, and as a result the war is very much covered as a local story in the newspaper here, which has been running stories almost every day about members of the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning. The 3rd ID, as they call it, was actually part of the initial invasion of Iraq, and is the first Army division to go for a third tour of duty there. That’s what’s happening right now.

The other night we watched a PBS show called When Parents Are Deployed (basically about how young miltary families deal with explaining to the childredn what’s going on) and I don’t think that’s something we would have done before the move. It’s not like we were unaware of the war, or the sacrifices military people make, or we didn’t have opinions about it all before. But it’s interesting how much more tangible it all is here.

In this morning’s paper, there were interviews with a few family members of re-deploying troops, openly wondering what was the point of it all when it would end. I’ve read articles like that before, of course, and you probably have, too.

Possiblly it’s weird for me to bring all this up here, since I don’t have an obvious point, and it’s totally “off topic.” But I guess that is the point. I spend so much of my professional life dwelling in a world where nobody really acknowledges that, you know, there’s a war going on. So I just wanted to acknoweldge it. If America made up of multiple mainstreams now, maybe we’re sort of living in a different one than we used to.