February 10, 2005
THE MISSION:
Wing And A Prayer (Zelie Pollon, January 26, 2005, AlterNet)
Spirituality and religion may have been bedrock for some soldiers before they arrived in Iraq, but for many of the nearly 150,000 men and women at war, a near miss with a mortar or becoming intimate with the smell of death is the best conversation starter with God. As they say, there are no atheists in foxholes."I haven't ever tried to talk to God as much as I have here," said Spc. Greg Dill, a Texan with the 598th Maintenance Company. Dill attended church occasionally at home but never considered himself religious — until now. Within two weeks of his arrival in Iraq, and on the day of his 24th birthday, his base suffered four separate mortar attacks.
"You just don't think about your life so much or the way you're living it when you're at home," he said. "It's been one of the better life experiences being out here."
There are no foxes in foxholes either, just hedgehogs. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2005 12:27 PM
If you reside in the real world, this is a dog bites man story, a commonplace that would be rejected by a similarly earth bound editor. An interesting news story, which is to say something truly freakish, would be to find soldiers who share the secularist pieties of the "brights" and see how they react to the reality of war. But of course the reporter/editor are "brights" who regard the common as excentric and themselves the magnetic north of balance. Thus do they bore and affront in one act.
Posted by: Luciferous at February 10, 2005 2:08 PM