Letters from Iraq

Hi.

HBO has a special on tonight: Last Letters Home: Voices of American Troops From the Battlefields of Iraq. I can't describe how powerful it is. Please see it.

The war has had an impact on all Americans, certainly some more than others. I don't know anyone in on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, and for that reason the war hasn't been as personal for me as for many other people. But it has still made me think -- about politics (of course), about the state of the world today, and about my future goals.

This show is...touching. Parents, siblings, other family members, reading the letters they had received from their loved ones who were killed in Iraq. It's chilling to hear the letters, realizing that many of them were written just a few months ago by soldiers younger than me. The most difficult letters are those that offer goodbyes, as if the soliders knew what their fate would be. The show has pictures of the soldiers, many of them writing these letters. A few of the family members received the letters weeks after their loved ones were killed.

I've always been interested in the military. It probably started when I was a kid; flight simulator video games intrigued me. It wasn't the was aspect that caught my attention. Instead, as you might expect, it was the technological aspects of the fighter planes that most interested me. World War I, World War II, modern day. I loved learning about the changes in technology -- improvements in engine power, development of lightweight alloys, electronic countermeasures -- that shaped these conflicts. I was far more interested in learning the how... how radar worked, how pilots naviagated, how they prepared to land. After a couple years, I was asking how submarines controlled buoyancy, how thermoclines affected sonar, and so on.

During high school, I had pondered the idea of joining the military (i.e., ROTC) but decided that it wasn't exactly what I wanted. During college, I thought of it again when I met a bunch of people in the ROTC program. In the last couple years, I thought more seriously about joining the military as a physician. Of course, this requires several other steps -- namely, getting into med school -- but the idea stuck with me. And after tonight's program, I'm thinking about it again.