The lead story in the print version of today’s New York Times is a story that barely breaks through in our fast-paced digital
communications: a family mourns a fallen soldier. Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar
"fought and died in a war that most Americans say is not worth fighting,
according to some polls. It is a war that seemed to be over in 2014, when
President Barack Obama announced the end of the original United States combat
mission,” wrote reporter David Zucchino. "Honestly, I thought the war was
over before Mark got sent there" the soldier’s sister-in-law said.
War is present and personal for deployed American soldiers
and their families. It is far off the radar screen of most Americans, exacerbated,
it seems, by our digital algorithms. The “top stories” in my digital version of
the New York Times this morning did not mention Sargent De Alencar at all.
"The war didn't seem to affect anyone outside the
military," remarked De Alencar’s widow, Natasha De Alencar. His son
Deshaun De Alencar emphasized: "His life was not taken: It was given to
his country," in an echo of Paul Kahn’s powerful work on the soldier’s
willing sacrifice.
A soldier’s giving of his life for others – for our
disconnected and distracted polity – generates a powerful duty that has been
ignored. At the very least, a soldier's death in a war fought in our name
requires that we pay attention to it. Engagement is our responsibility.
But simple attention is not weighty enough to honor this
family’s sacrifice. There are renewed calls for Congress to reengage with
American armed conflict. De Alencar died in Afghanistan “while fighting Islamic
State militants.” Congress has declined to authorize armed conflict against
ISIS or in Syria, so that presidents rely instead on creative interpretations
of preexisting authorizations for the use of force. This puts the task of
defining war’s limits within the Office of Legal Counsel, which defines them in
secret memos. This is hardly a source of democratic limits on presidential war
power.
Though the blame for the absence of restraint falls, in
part, on Congress, blame is shared by the American people. I have seen no
demands in the recent town hall meetings in congressional districts for
congressional engagement with the nation’s use of force. Americans care about
what they feel personally. As Natasha De Alencar said, most Americans seem
unaffected by the conflict that cost her children their father. The most
important democracy deficit in contemporary armed conflict is that a citizenry
isolated from war's cost enables ongoing war without restraint.