plutherus

I wasn't a terrorist this morning.
Oh, I've seen your TV and the propaganda you put out.
You'd like to think that I and all of my countrymen
were terrorists. But this morning, I wasn't. I was a
farmer. I was working in my fields this morning. Just
like I was most mornings for the last fifteen years.
I spent the last war working on the farm, when the
Taliban was driven out and the so-called Northern
Alliance was put in. Neither one really bothered me,
though I've heard horror stories about both. I took
up arms briefly, when I was younger, and helped to
drive the Soviets out. I've still got the rifle that
the Americans gave me, hanging in my shed. But that
was a long time ago, and there aren't any Soviets
anymore. And since then, I've worked my farm. It
wasn't a large farm, but we grew enough for us to eat,
and sometimes enough to sell for a little extra money.
My wife was inside this morning, nursing our infant
daughter. When somebody in your government got a
message that somebody who knew Osama bin Laden might
be attending a wedding nearby. Not in my village, but
one nearby. But I guess somebody wanted to be sure
they got the right one, so they bombed all four
villages in the area. I imagine reports were filed,
meetings were held, decisions made. But I don't know
about any of that. All I know is, I heard a loud
noise, and then my wife, my daughter, and my farm were
gone.

My sons were faster to react than I was. While I
stood, stunned, unable to move, they both started
running towards the crater where our house used to
stand. I looked up in time to see the jets flying
away. More noises, whining, then loud thumps. Thunder
in the distance, then near enough to knock me down.
As I fell I saw one of my sons flying through the air,
broken limbs flailing in all directions. My other son
turned toward me, and I saw that half his head was
missing. He took one step in my direction before
falling down forever.

I buried my sons this afternoon. There wasn't enough
left of my wife, or my daughter, to bury. My family
is gone. My farm is gone. I have nothing left. Except
that old rifle the Americans gave me, still hanging in
the shed. I hear on the radio, and on the pamphlets
you drop all over the countryside, that this is all
Osama bin Laden's fault. You had to bomb us, kill us,
in order to drive out the Taliban because of bin
Laden. So I'm going to take that old rifle out of the
shed, and I'm going to hunt down bin Laden. And when
I find him, I'm going to pledge to him my life, to
spend as he will.
Yes, I know you said that this is
all his fault. But I also know who dropped those
bombs that took away, in less than a heartbeat,
everything I cared about on earth. You said it was
necessary to get rid of the Taliban. And now the
Taliban are gone, and nobody will mourn their passing.
Most people around here hated them by then anyway.
Oh, they were popular at first, they were the only
ones who could hold things together. They did bring
stability for a while, thanks to your support. But
they went bad fast. I've heard stories that are worse
even than what gets reported in your press. It wasn't
too far from here where a young girl, after being
raped by a devout Taliban man, was brutally put to
death by stoning for having the gall to accuse him.
But even the Taliban never killed a beautiful infant
girl for the crime of living in a village too close to
a village where they thought somebody they wanted dead
might be attending a wedding. You bomb four villages
to try to kill one man. I hope you got him. It would
be a shame to do all that for nothing. Though I
suppose it doesn't seem like much to you. A stroke of
the pen. A push of a button. A one-line entry on a
casualty report. And I have nothing left to live for.

When your Trade Centers fell, you asked why. I saw
your news reports. Did you know we get American TV all
the way out here? We do. I thought it was sad, but
didn't give it much thought. It was a long ways away,
and it didn't really affect us here. I guess I was
wrong about that last. But you asked why? Why did
this happen? And your politicians and their trained
seals went on TV and did their best to provide you the
answers, in the hope that once you had an answer,
you'd stop asking the question. They said it was
because the didn't like the fact you treat women as
equals, or they hated your freedom, or your
prosperity, or your religion. I couldn't tell you for
sure what their reason was. But I'm going to hunt
down bin Laden, and maybe he'll pay for flight
lessons, and arrange a fake passport for me. And
maybe someday somebody over there in America will read
this and so, when you look at the next smoking crater
in one of your cities where a building used to stand,
you won't have to ask why. You'll know. Somewhere
there is a military report of one among many missions
over Afghanistan. Signed. Stamped. Filed.
And the answer is there, distilled to a single line
that reads "Civilian casualties: minor."