<>Ask the kid in the ICU burn unit whether the securement of 380,000 pounds of conventional explosives in the first moments of the Iraq War was really unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Consider carefully, though. The question may be answered the long way round. Because with anything else, and as every world leader has said about the Iraq conflict, it’s just not that simple. The answers just aren’t in black and white.

Specialist Dixon was the All-American kid in the middle of the best years of his life. A football star with a prom queen girlfriend, a good job back home and the plan to get out and go to college for five years, become an architect, and design multiple-family homes that people could afford in the tight housing market of Boulder, Colorado, Dixon knew that he was in the Army to not only do his part, but to do the job he signed up for.

The morning he and his buddy rolled into the center of Baghdad on a mission to escort a convoy of supplies, the same day that George W. Bush put a supplemental budget request for over $87 billion dollars to “supply our troops with what they need”, a bomb went off in the street. Five gallons of gasoline, mixed with dish detergent got detonated by a cellular phone in a roadside bomb with a pound of HMX as the main explosive device. Steel ball bearings, chunks of rebar concrete, and nuts and bolts were packed into the crude device, designed to blow outwards to a thin-skinned Humvee.

Dixon doesn’t remember it. All he remembers is seeing his best friend, Jay, who enlisted with him right out of high school; assigned to the same company, and his brother in arms suddenly missing most of his face. He doesn’t remember the chunk of shrapnel carried on a wave of homemade napalm searing his lower stomach muscles, or the body of the Humvee collapsing from the blast. He doesn’t remember the medic vomiting as he held the charred intestines of the blue-eyed blonde All-American boy with the picture of the pretty girl in his wallet – now soaked in chemicals and blood.

Specialist Dixon was a great, natural leader. Even as his medics hurried him to the helicopter, he argued with them to take his friend Jay first, since “Jay was pretty messed up, and that’s all I could think of.” He didn’t think of the pain that would come, dancing throughout his spine in rictus waves. He didn’t know he’d never taste Mom’s chili again, or that his face was splintered by small shreds of metal, or that a small bolt was still lodged in his skull – neatly installed, like a picture screw at the frame shop he worked at through high school to help pay for his sister’s private school tuition.

None of these things Dixon really thinks about now. Dixon fully admits to being an alcoholic and a morphine addict – because when you’re in the hospital and there’s nothing to take the edge off of the pain, morphine sounds really good. And the alcohol is the one drug he can take himself. His nurse gets it for him on prescription precisely because if he doesn’t have at least three beers a day, he gets the delirium tremens. It’s the good stuff – Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine, with a 10% alcohol content. Most of it seeps out of his upper intestine and into a small plastic container, cloudy with bile and stomach acid, but what he can get out of it

Specialist Dixon is missing his lower intestine – the small, curly bits of gut that process the rest of his food. His liver is gone; kidneys nearly failed, and the diaphragm that allows him to inhale and exhale on his own power is gone. His mother has quit her job to fly to take care of him, to hold his hand at his bedside. His face is still blistered with purple and red. He jokingly refers to himself as “The Human Pizza”.

Two months ago the love of his life told him she could not be with him any longer – and it was only after he had told her it was his fault that she moved on with her life. She had an abortion during his absence – after discussion that neither of them could be a parent, with him in Iraq and she going to community college and working during the day.

Four days later Specialist Dixon was coated in homemade napalm, and saw his best friend’s jugular spray-paint the inside of the vehicle.

It is ironic, Dixon tells me, that Jay and Dixon told each other that they would die to protect each other. Even after Jay said he worried he wouldn’t make it through, they forged a bond and slept together in the same tent, ate together, and did everything they could throughout the day as a team. Jay wrote to his wife that the pair of them were almost married, they did so many things together – from watching DVDs in the barracks to joining George W. Bush for Thanksgiving in Iraq. They watched each others’ backs. They talked a lot about politics and why they were there. And the both of them agreed that it was well worth it – worth the money they spent on their own body armor, worth the accessories, worth the new boots, the time away from family,

Then there was fire and red hot bolts searing through the cab of their Humvee, and without ever thinking about it, Jay held true to his word – he flung himself across the line of fire to protect his friend Dix, collecting over six hundred foreign objects in his government-issued body armor – without the ceramic plates that may have saved his life had they been issued to all soldiers before they were deployed.

Officially, Jay died from massive blood loss and fourth-degree burns, but unofficially, Dixon remembers cradling his friend’s hand and knowing that he was dead – not least because Jay’s hand was no longer attached at the wrist to the rest of Jay’s body.

Some of that might be nightmares – the delirium tremens hits Dixon every now and again, and combined with the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Dixon has nightmares. He sometimes doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not. But then he will reach down to the cavity of his stomach, where the muscle grafts from the backs of his thighs were taken to remake his belly. He feels the warm plastic of the catheters and the intravenous drips against his skin and sometimes they burn, and he screams, and his nursing team helps him remember he’s in the states, in a burn unit in San Antonio, Texas, recovering what he has left of his life.

Dixon’s mother told me she was preparing to bury her son. Not in the next month, or in the next two months, but in the next year, because that’s how much time her blue-eyed baby boy has to live. The doctors have been explicit about life expectancy. She started saving for a funeral, and has already bought a neat plot. She is a former project manager for a small firm, and she knows how to do things correctly. She is holding on, a small, tightly-wound person with wiry gray hair shorn in a sensible short cut, with a small, simple gold wedding band. This is her only son.

I only know Dixon and his mom because I write letters – letters that say, “I know that you are angry. I know you’re hurting. I know that nothing I say can bring you any peace – indeed, nothing that your leader did, or is doing, currently makes any sense or difference to what you’re going through.

I know that the last thing you want to hear is platitudes about how to win the peace or the war or the fight against terror. The only thing I know is that even though the government is ignoring you, and the body politik has swept you under the rug, you are not forgotten.”

Dixon and Jay are two casualties of the Iraq war. Jay is listed as a United States Marine Corps casualty on the Department of Defense’s website. If he dies, Dixon will never mark on that wall – because he came home.

But they are two of the lambs sacrificed on the altar of one man’s ego. They know it – their parents know it. They gave their lives because they believed in the greatness of America – not that Saddam had to be removed. They went and they fought believing their leader, George W. Bush, would make good on the promises that he would give them everything they needed to win. He believed so strongly in the promises of his commander-in-chief that everything would be okay for the military – from the supplies they needed to the bullets they had to ration out during engagements - that Dixon took out a Humvee they knew wouldn’t stand up to small arms fire, let alone a homemade incendiary bomb made from one pound of HMX explosive, four pounds of scrap metal, one container of Tide, and five gallons of American-taxpayer subsidized gasoline.

<>Dixon doesn’t blame George W. Bush for the lack of armor on his Humvee, or that his buddy’s body was the only shield between him and the bomb blast. Between hits of the morphine that get him in and out of painful coherence, he explains to his mother that Bush wasn’t there; couldn’t have seen the bomb. <>

But this morning when she turns on the news, she’ll see that over 380,000 pounds of explosive – including the HMX that shortened her son’s life expectancy from sixty years to eighteen months – vanished from an Iraqi munitions depot in the first few moments of the war. And she knows she’ll be alive long after she receives a folded triangular flag.

Specialist Dixon’s mother isn’t saying anything while her son seeps his food into a plastic bag, and the bedding is slowly stained by pinkish fluids so that she must call a nurse to change the sheets every four hours. She doesn’t say anything while her still-handsome son’s eyes glaze over as the television images from Iraq flow over them. She, a lifelong teetotaler, doesn’t say a word when her twenty-two year old son gropes for a smooth glass of strong beer and drinks it down in one go.

But she has said to me in a private email of her own, that she is simply waiting until she knows her voice will no longer destroy what little life her son has left. She said, simply, that she is waiting for her son to die, as she waited for his father to die, and then she will be free to tell the world exactly what she thinks of George. W. Bush.

“Try the Hot Pockets, they’re breathtaking.”

I finally figured out who Donald Rumsfeld reminds me of. It’s Dr. Evil, from the Austin Powers movie. He’s a bent sex symbol in many ways – from the pouty lips to the ice-blue eyes and the funky skin; the scars on his face and the growly look. It’s just that Mike Myers does the humor of it much better. And at least the Mike Myers character is nefarious and witless on purpose. The hissy fits of “Oh, now, come on people, you have to tell me these things, I’ve been frozen for thirty freaking years, you know,” fits better with Dr. Evil than Mr. Rumsfeld’s, “Well, that was the information we had at the time, which was the same information everyone else had.”

Never mind that all fifteen challengers of the Afghanistan presidential election announced a full boycott of the election – Rumsfeld said, ``Not withstanding all the comments in the media -- that it was a quagmire, that this wouldn't work and that was going to go bad, and that everything was terrible -- the fact is they just had an election. It's breathtaking!''

Never mind that multiple voting fraud occurred; never mind that Karzai is connected by financial and business relationships to the Bush administration; never mind that the Taliban still controls large sections of the Afghanistan countryside; never mind that human rights abuses have increased since the fall of the Taliban; never mind that drug production, especially of high-quality opium and heroin, have skyrocketed since the Taliban fell; the election is “breathtaking” and that’s that – the eagle has landed, democracy’s on the march, and Afghanistan is now counted in a member country in the “Coalition of the Willing” currently working in Iraq.

Fascinating. ``I recognize that the media will fly-speck that election and say that this wasn't perfect, or that happened, or some ink came off, but it was an enormous accomplishment,'' Rumsfeld told a news conference during a brief visit to Macedonia.

When all fifteen presidential candidates other than your baby boy drop out, saying the election is illegitimate due to the manipulation of the polls, that’s hardly fly-specking. Nor is it remotely “perfect”. Of course, if you’re going to go ahead and install a puppet regime, it doesn’t do to let the rest of the world know you’re doing it on the sly, and on the cheap. When your adored lean-and-mean military fails to nail the SOB that hit the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001, it’s often better to just announce that you’ve succeeded – even as your own CIA and oil contacts are fed at the trough of the Afghani people.

Pass the hookah, Rummy – I need to get a hit of what you’re smoking. Maybe then I can accept that Bush is a legitimate president, duly elected by the people of the United States. Maybe then I can accept that Iraq was a legal invasion.

Seriously, you get this stuff where? In Afghanistan?

Hold on, I’m going to go stare at my hands in the corner for a while. You go ahead and do whatever you’re going to do – I just want to hang out with the president over here and watch the pretty colors go by for a while.