Because

The horrors of war. The visual obsession of a self-indulgent people. In an attempt to be perceived as compassionate and sensitive, we have elevated suffering to a hallowed pinnacle. We make death our god and lose sight of anything beyond or above it. An effeminate people, we have forgotten the distinctions between the inescapable tragedies which occur in war and the very horrors of man which force us to war where we confront them unmitigated. Both are seen through battlefield eyes but they are a far pace from each other, cause and side-effect.

Deep, carved into the texture of my soul, resides an album of images. Each is black and white, not because that is how I first saw them, but because that is what they are—black and white, unambiguous, good and evil. I began the collection early in life, listening to the men of my family speak of war. Not the jovial tales they told early in the day, but the whispered events recounted heavily after we children were supposed to be abed; these wide-eyed eavesdroppings of my childhood form the bindings of the album. Because this was my family, my legacy and context. Because it was so very, very real.

I was no more than fourteen when I learned of the Holocaust, dry words and numbers in textbooks, clean and sanitized yet still horrific. I sought out the pictures and the diaries. I made myself see evil perpetrated against innocence. I let the images of the aftermath burn into me. I did not like it. I did not enjoy it. It was necessary, a thing I needed to see and know—an evil too long unopposed, a rescue too long in coming. Good triumphed in the end but…if only…

I have shaken hands and seen the tattoos. I have spoken with men reduced to numbers, for easy bookkeeping in death, by their fellow man. I have looked into eyes which have stared Hell full in the face.

Because evil is real, and good is too often late.

To my black book, I have added page after page as the years progress. The latest pages are the clearest—Tiananmen Square, the gassing of the Kurds, Somalia, Kosovo, and two towers in New York blazing, falling in the morning sun.

I remember. I choose to remember.

Again we put to war, too long in coming, to save a people. We are besieged with images: torture, rape, genocide, human shields, suicide bombers with families held hostage, POWs executed in cold blood—the utter depravity of man, the drums of evil beat on. These are not horrors spawned by the war. These are the horrors that are the reason for the war.

There are worse things than death; there is failure.

While half the world tells us to wait and talk, that it is not our business, we march to free a people and remove a cancer. And when we are done, we will apologize in our hearts for our tardiness. Because we must remember. Because war is not the author of these horrors but the eraser.

Because evil is real.

Because good is too often late.