Tuesday, June 5, 2007

ending the war

My dad and I were chosen to join a special ops team whose goal was to end the war in Iraq. We were slated to leave for the theater in a few hours so we needed to pack up our things. I was sitting in my house when suddenly Donna came in and asked me if I was packed or not. I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to listen to her scolding, so I told her I was ready. A few minutes later, she came back and informed me that she’d been all through my house and she couldn’t find any packed bags. Annoyed and upset, I went to my room, emptied a small duffel bag of its contents, and began stuffing underwear and socks into it.

We boarded a military plane at the airport along with Ben, who was also a part of our group, and a group of military personnel. Upon arriving in Baghdad, I was amazed at the thousands of Iraqis who were standing in lines and waiting for flights to leave the country. I began taking pictures of the Iraqis, the myriad of planes lined up on the runways, and the tall, thin billows of smoke that seemed to surround us. It was truly a country at war.

We boarded our helicopters and began to fly out into the countryside. We took some small arms fire, but nothing that would deter us from our stated objective: ending the war.

We flew out to a remote place in the desert that was miles from any town or village that we knew of and dropped a bomb. One bomb. It was on a timed fuse, so we had plenty of time to evacuate the area before it went off. So how could one bomb possibly stop a country at war? Well, this wasn’t just any bomb…it was a nuclear bomb. The U.S. had recently developed a “clean” nuke, so the initial blast was just as devastating as a real nuke, but with none of the radiation side-effects. We detonated this clean bomb as a warning to the insurgents that we were not afraid to use the greatest weapon that we had at our disposal and we would bomb the entire country if necessary.

The mission accomplished its goal. Days later the insurgents unconditionally surrendered and the war was ended.