Lower the Volume

Election Day will mark nearly 20 years since my friend Dan Malcom was killed on a rooftop in Fallujah. Dan died trying to help my platoon. Friendly artillery had us pinned down on a roof. Hot shards of jagged shrapnel slapped against the side of our building. Dan had climbed into an exposed position to shift that artillery when a sniper’s bullet found him. He was 25 years old. When I finally came home from Iraq, I was 24, but I had as many dead friends as an 80-year-old. I also had lots of questions—probably more than I knew at the time. Today, if you ask someone about Fallujah, they’re likely to remember the battle but to have forgotten that it was about an election.

It was easy to be cynical about Iraq then, just as it’s easy to be cynical about America today. And when I came home, I felt cynical. A senior officer, a man I respected, sensed I was struggling. He took me aside. He told me not to forget what guys like Dan had sacrificed for, and then he showed me a photo of an Iraqi woman, smiling, her ink-stained finger raised in the air. Not long after that battle, millions of Iraqis had voted for the first time in their life, proudly displaying their fingers stained with ink to indicate that they had cast ballots. They made strides toward creating a political system where their country’s future would be decided at a ballot box instead of the barrel of a gun.