Joan Swirsky
Sunday, May 3, 2004

So on April 30, he devoted his entire program to reading the names of the 721 American fighting men and women who had been killed in action in Iraq since the war began in March of 2003.

According to an editor at Life who was interviewed recently on the Fox News Network, the stunning pictorial he presented over 30 years ago was a turning point in the war, effectively mobilizing the entire country to protest our presence in Vietnam and ultimately bring that war to an end.

It is important to remember, however, that the Vietnam War was a war against the tyrannical rule of Communism and that America lost that war not because of the heart or heroism of our fighting forces but because of the cowardice of our leaders, the rank politics of the time and the budding “me generation” that thought flower power was superior to freeing Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from their murderous “leaders.”

Koppel’s decision to present a latter-day version of the Life article was met with an impassioned hue and cry from Republicans who called his decision “playing politics.” Or more accurately, engaging in more Bush bashing by showing the American public “not just numbers” but real life people who the war – “misguided” and based on “lies” according to months of ABC’s coverage – has claimed.

I watched the program and it served in my mind not to bash Bush at all but to bring me to tears and to inspire a huge swell of pride, patriotism and gratitude.

My tears were of a personal, historical and universal nature, influenced by the fact that I am a mother and grandmother but also in recognition that hundreds of thousands of American heroes have died to defend our country and way of life and also that it is simply not in the natural order of things for children to die before their parents do, whether their untimely ends are met by grave illnesses, drive-by shootings, catastrophic accidents, the ravages of drugs or the horrors of war.

In whatever way children die, it is the last of seeing and speaking to and touching the people we love most intensely, the last of their unfulfilled promise and the last of the hope that their futures might hold. In the Jewish religion, the ritual of mourning for parents lasts a year, but the ritual of mourning for children has no time frame, which is our religion's realistic acknowledgement that when a parent predeceases a child, it is what nature intended, but that the death of a child – and the grief that follows – has no end.

At the same time, Koppel’s program gave me a sense of immense pride – pride in the great numbers of young Americans who have volunteered to serve their country, knowing full well what the ultimate consequences could be. Koppel read names and showed photographs of America’s fallen that included every ethnic group and religion imaginable from America’ peerless “melting pot.”

But they did not tell the whole story. I and millions of TV viewers worldwide have seen numerous interviews with the men and women of our fighting forces aired from Afghanistan and Iraq: clear-eyed, proud, intelligent, committed young people whose mission was unmistakable to them.

And what was that mission? Protecting the United States of America from harm! They “got” 9/11! They “got” the history of our country and the enormous sacrifices of the generations before theirs that insured our safety, security, values and freedom. They “got” the notion that fighting and even dying for their country was a noble and heroic act – more lofty, in fact, than anything that anyone could possibly aspire to.

Koppel’s program also served to make me burst with patriotism and give me a renewed and quite exhilarated sense that America, in all of its complicated and quite dazzling history, is not only the most rich and powerful nation on earth, but also the most generous, most embracing and most free. Those brave fallen soldiers “got” that too!

And Koppel’s program also imbued me with the feeling of overwhelming gratitude that in this unprecedented time in history, when our very lives are at stake, Americans have been blessed by the good fortune of having a president who had and continues to have the vision and courage and boldness of action to take the war that was inflicted on us by fanatical terrorists to their own lands, sparing our country – to this date – not even one attack on our shores since September 11, 2001.

Was Koppel’s intention “political”? Of course! While he has enjoyed great success as a broadcaster, he has been an utter failure over his long career in concealing his leftist leanings.

In fairness, he did mention the grave toll that war has traditionally taken – mentioning the 440,000 who died in World War II. But he might have added further perspective by citing the fact that if he read off the names of all those killed at the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, it would have taken him not 40 minutes but 24 hours, or the fact that on April 15, 1945 (the day former Senator Bob Dole was nearly killed during the final battle to win the war in Italy), 556 American soldiers lost their lives in one day alone.

But I still say, Thank you, Ted Koppel! Your program was an affirmation that American heroes – especially the champions and defenders of Democracy you featured on your program – who believed in America and sacrificed their lives to demonstrate their convictions – are the people who have allowed you and me and almost 300,000 million Americans to go about their lives, engage in their careers, raise their children, invest in their futures and go to sleep every night relatively secure in the belief that our magnificent way of life won’t be interrupted by homicide bombers or worse.

And Koppel’s program also inspired me to thank the parents of those wonderful young men and women for the superlative job they did in raising children with such clear vision and strong backbones, and with the character and courage to fight – and to die – so heroically for our country.

Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com