The lonely American

Each day I watch the TV news images of American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad and wonder if the same images are shown in the United States. If they are shown, I wonder why the people do not rise up in revolt. Each day I feel a deep sympathy for the infinite loneliness of the American soldier in Iraq.

The soldier in dust-colored camouflage uniform and helmet, his bullet-proof vest (not really bullet- proof and certainly not bomb-proof, as I see each day: five of them died yesterday in Baghdad alone), brandishing his automatic weapon, standing alone at a Baghdad checkpoint, an empty look on his face (though he is terrified and wonders how he got into this chaos), surrounded by a world he does not understand, by people speaking a language he does not understand, in the middle of a war he does not understand, this bewildered American seems to be the loneliest man in the world.

Because I am an American, I watch this soldier sadly. I think that there stands the emblem of America’s isolation in the world. And I think also that something is dreadfully wrong in a country that still has a supply of volunteers to go to the deserts to kill strangers with super weapons and drop firebombs on cities from invisible planes in the stratosphere . . . and with a 10 percent chance of being killed themselves for the worst possible reasons.

Beyond politics, beyond the questions of war and peace, I wonder about Americans in general, so lonely in the universe. A whole people feeling the loneliness you feel behind locked doors. Behind walls. A kind of vacancy. What is it that other people have and we Americans do not? Or what do Americans have that others do not? Why are Americans different? I do not believe it was always that way. But it is today. And it is a mystery.

Recently I began asking friends in Italy where I have lived for over three decades those questions. Italians say that Americans are spoiled; they have it too good; they haven’t suffered enough. Europeans often think of Americans as children, difficult children, with a childlike air of impregnability about them, whom real life has not yet touched.

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