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Nation's Real High Cost Isn't Gas; It's Lives

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By STEVE OTTO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 25, 2008

Four dollars? ... Five dollars? ... I saw one guy on TV last week claiming we would eventually see gas at 12 bucks a gallon.

Who knows? Obviously none of the so-called experts. What we all know is that it is beginning to hurt. For the first time, traffic this holiday weekend is expected to be lower than the previous year's.

The cost of energy has overshadowed everything else, even this Memorial Day as Americans consider staying closer to home and keeping some of those SUV behemoths in driveways.

I think that might not be such a bad idea, staying at home for a few days. It probably wouldn't hurt us to spend a little time around the house, getting to know the family you never see and just maybe even taking a little time to consider the real cost of this holiday.

That occurred to me last week when I was listening to World War II fighter ace PJ Dahl, as he described a few of those incredible exploits of the members of the 475th Fighter Group, which is holding its reunion this weekend in Tampa.

2 Fathers, 1 War

As Dahl talked about those days in the South Pacific and of a time when an entire generation of young Americans was caught up in a global conflict, I started thinking about my father.

He had been on that side of the world as well, flying the hump over the Himalayas into China.

Eventually, he had gone on to other islands in the Pacific.

And I thought about my wife's father. He had been in Europe, where his plane had gone down and he had become a prisoner of war.

Now my father is buried at Arlington and her father is at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell. They share those fields with tens of thousands of Americans who joined in the service of their country, so many of whom died in the process. We stop by the cemetery in Bushnell occasionally and wander along the rows lined up so neatly, many of the markers mentioning the time and place of death of those who are buried there.

I've marched on other Memorial Day services in Europe at cemeteries where other Americans lie, forever away from the country and the families they defended.

How do you measure that cost?

An Enormously High Cost

I don't know. It's not quite the same as adding up the cost of gasoline, is it? There you can always reach a point where the cost is too much and you reach a decision to park the car and start walking.

But how do you measure lives?

In the Middle East, when three or four Americans are killed a week, it becomes a dribble in the news, lost on the back pages if at all. It becomes acceptable. It must be so because nobody seems to notice.

It's only on those catastrophic days when something goes wrong and a bomb blows up a dozen or so soldiers, or maybe an ambush takes an unusually high toll of Americans.

I hate it. One dead 19-year-old blown up thousands of miles away from home is a cost we all need to feel. It's on days like this you can close your eyes and hear the voices.

If you allow yourself to listen, you remember that the cost of being Americans is a debt we cannot repay, we can only remember and honor those who did what they did and then try to preserve their spirit.

Email Steve Otto: sotto@tampatrib.com

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