March 19, 2003, I was propped up in the living room watching TV through the fog of a major concussion. I dimly remember the flashes of shock and awe against the Baghdad skyline, the hazy green night vision images of the 82nd Airborne parachuting into the city, the breathless dispatches from embedded reporters, the vague sense that we should be worried for the boys in the army and marines but that it was going to be another 52-hour Gulf War cakewalk with a few scratches and more casualties from traffic accidents than from hostile fire.
My head hurt and my stomach lurched through appointments with neurologists I can't remember to this day. I know my partner and the kids were there at home with me, but all my recollections are of being alone with the jigsaw puzzles I obsessively worked, and the war on TV constantly.
It took a full year for my brain to completely emerge from the fog. And today, March 19, 2007, four years after the beginning of the war that Rumsfeld assured us would be over in no more than six months, the war that Cheney assured us would resolve with US troops being greeted as liberators? Today 3,217 Americans are dead, no one can say for sure how many Iraqi civilians have joined them, and the fog of war is thicker than ever.
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