By October 2005, when American casualties in Iraq had not yet reached 2,000 dead or 15,000 wounded, and our casualties in Afghanistan were still modest indeed, informal "walls" had already begun springing up online to honor the fallen. At that time, I suggested that "the particular dishonor this administration has brought down on our country calls out for other ‘walls’ as well." I imagined, then, walls of shame for Bush administration figures and their cronies — and even produced one (in words) that November. By now, of course, any such wall would be full to bursting with names that will live in infamy.
That October, at the website I run, TomDispatch.com, we launched quite a different project, another kind of "wall," this time in tribute to the striking number of "governmental casualties of Bush administration follies, those men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their government duties," and so often found themselves smeared and with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, or simply be pushed off the cliff by cronies of the administration.
Nick Turse led off what we came to call our "fallen legion" project with a list of 42 such names, ranging from the well-known Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki (who retired after suggesting to Congress that it would take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq) and Richard Clarke (who quit, appalled by how the administration was dealing with terror and terrorism) to the moderately well known Ann Wright, John Brown, and John Brady Kiesling (three diplomats who resigned to protest the coming invasion of Iraq) to the little known Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin (who resigned under pressure, possibly so that various Bush papers could be kept under wraps). By the time Turse had written his second fallen legion piece that November, and then the third and last in February 2006, that list of names had topped 200 with no end in sight.
Today, to its eternal shame, the Bush administration has left not just its own projects, but the nation it ruled, in ruins. No wall could fit its particular "accomplishments." Turse, who recently wrote for the Nation magazine "A My Lai a Month," a striking exposé of a U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam that slaughtered thousands of civilians, returns in the last moments of this dishonored administration with a fitting capstone piece for the honorably fallen in Washington, "A Truth-teller for Our Time," on former insider Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He was the man who, in 2005, spoke of a "cabal" within the White House making key national security decisions, and more recently, of his own grim experiences in Vietnam, including the killing of a young girl in a free fire zone, as a warning to American soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of it as the last of the "fallen legion" series, a memory piece — lest we forget.
