Next vets

When I walk into the Public Affairs office every morning, there's a pile of six papers waiting for me on the coffee table. Part of my job is to sift through each one, look for any mention of Fermilab or particle physics and post what I find on a big bulletin board at the office's entrance. It takes a while, but I don't mind. In fact, I enjoy it. It gives me an excuse to read the stories I'd probably read on the Internet anyway, plus, I always come across something interesting. Like today.
I was flipping through the Chicago Sun-Times when a photo of a guy in a cowboy hat caught my attention. His ears missing, his face displayed next to a photo of a double amputee on one side and a woman with a melted face and hands on the other. It was a story about Veteran's Day, of those who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, aka the Iraq war, aka put your choice name here. The guy in the cowboy hat had graduated from my high school the year after me. I didn't know him, but gossip travels quickly at home and I soon learned his story this summer when the Humvee he was driving through an Iraqi village ran over a bomb and was hit by a motar. He was lit on fire, burning almost all of his body, ruining most of the control of his hands and melting off his ears. Of the four soldiers in the car, he was the only survivor.
Stories like these don't seem real to me. War is something my grandpa experienced, those of the "Greatest Generation." Something that sent thousands, and almost my dad, to Vietnam years before I was born. It's those green screen shots I watched on TV as a kid. It's for the movies, the history books and the video games where if you know the secret code, you can take in a whole round of bullets without chipping even a square away from your lifebar. It's not for my generation. But obviously, it now is. The next generation of veterans are serving right now. At my age, and mostly younger, many have already completed their career as a soldier. Some come back melted, without limbs or movement and with mental images I can't begin to imagine. And those are the lucky ones.