A little boy on the tarmac

It's been raining here a lot, to the point where I am beginning to doubt this alleged rain shadow. Perhaps I have been gone from the northwest so long that I no longer know how much rain is a lot of rain. This is what is on my mind, rain, for the same reason anyone talks about the weather because it's easy, but I can only ignore the outside world for so long.
On Sunday night I receive a text from a Marine I met in Afghanistan. It read, "Holy crap, Osama bin Laden is dead."
I look online for reports on CBS, FOX, ABC etc., all with the same story. I watch Obama's speech. I watch the Daily Show. I read different posts anywhere from jokes to celebrations of death, anti-celebrations of death to corrections about what Martin Luther King said about peace.
"The face of the Arab world in America's eyes for too long has been bin Laden and now it is not, " said Jon Stewart. "Now the face is only the young people in Egypt, Tunisia and all the Middle Eastern countries across the world where freedom rises up."
But we do not know how Osama bin Laden's death will change things quite yet.
It does remind me of the vast chasm which separates me from the Middle East, a place that resembles nothing surrounding me now. It reminds me of soldiers and Marines who have lost limbs and lives and of the destroyed lives of Iraqis and Afghans.
I have pulled from the archives a short piece I wrote about the casualties of war.


As an aircraft lands on the tarmac, the hospital staff wheels out a little boy no more than two. Attached to his arm is an IV bag of liquid as big as his entire body. He holds a small floppy dog toy in his lap. The helicopter is at least a half a mile away, but dust manages to float up in the air around us.  A soldier kneels before the boy, extending his hand for a handshake. The little boy reaches out and takes the man’s hand with some hesitation. He doesn’t smile or laugh. His big brown eyes as still. The bandages are still on his chest from gunshot wounds.
I imagine there are scars he’ll bear forever.

I first met the boy a week ago when another soldier, a magician by hobby, a pilot by profession, wanted me to photograph him performing magic tricks for kids at the hospital.

As we walked inside the children’s ward, the nurses wheeled the boy out. They dressed him in a frayed yellow shirt that said something like, “I heart the U.S.”
I raised my camera lens and the nurses rushed to me, frowning and saying urgently, “No photos allowed.”

The boy’s father, either a terrorist or a sheik or both, depending on which rumors you believe, had never been to the hospital and therefore could not sign release papers for photographs, so this child of war was un-captured, no one outside those walls would remember his eyes, that begged the question, “Why must we watch the world burn?”
Children have that affect on everyone, a medic told me.
“You have to treat everyone the same, but when you see children you just can’t feel something else,” he said, red and watery eyed after transporting another  toddler with massive wounds.
Some of the other medics commented on the terrible smell of impending death.

Several weeks after I saw the little boy on the tarmac, he died. The wounds on his belly were too large, too deep.
I do not know if anyone came to gather his remains. I do not know if it would have mattered if I had a picture of him, if it would have made any difference at all.

What I do know is that hope is a fragile cage to live in and I still hear whispers when I sleep. 

“Our lives are at risk aren’t yours?” the ghosts of murdered children ask weeping without tears or fear or rage, but with the dull curiosity of an adult in the dying lights of my nightmares.