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“I want my Mommy…” – dying US Marine, La Drang, Vietnam, 1965

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You might have seen this image before. These folks are Pakistani-Americans, Khizr Khan and his wife, parents of fallen US Army Captain Humayun Khan. The Khans are seen here, speaking at the DNC Convention, July 2016, waving a pamphlet version of the US Constitution

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For those of us living outside America, the concept of ‘gold star families’ is an interesting one. These are folks who have one tragic thing in common – they are the immediate family of American soldiers who have lost their lives while on active duty.

Main sub-groups are Gold Star Fathers and Mothers – Gold Star Wives and husbands, you get the hang. There is even an officially designated Gold Star Mothers’ Day – the last Sunday in September each year.

Last Sunday was Gold Star Mothers’ Day, therefore this ‘homage’.

Displaying a Gold Star lapel button projects immense prestige and honour. If you have one on, people will treat you with hushed reverence. If you are in a line, you get served first. Once in a while, the meal at a restaurant might even be on the house.

Everybody treats you differently. It is awesome. The principle is interesting……get your son killed in a war of aggression 7000 miles away and get to jump the queue or eat free at the local diner.

You can even get to address a political convention. Like in the case of the Khans of Charlottesville, Virginia……

Khizr Khan, a Harvard-educated legal consultant, had his wife Ghazala with him when he delivered a moving address at the national convention of the Democratic Party of the US a few months before the 2016 US Presidential Elections. At that point, late July, Hilary Clinton had turned cocky, certain she was going to be Pres.

Getting back to Khizr Khan, it is amazing how the man held it together, remaining stoic while he spoke, his wife looking up at him from time to time, with a mixture of concern and pain in her eyes. Their dignity added to the impact of his speech. You can watch his address here, on YouTube.

After Mr Khan had said what he had come to say, all hell broke loose. The talk shows united on one thing – that he had struck a chord. Even among many Republicans, Trump’s standing took a brief nose dive.

Here’s what their son did for America, as per the citation that his parents received from the US Army…..

In 2004, Khan Jr was assigned to the 201st Forward Support Battalion, 1st Infantry Division in Vilseck, Germany, when he was deputed to Iraq.

Three months into his tour of duty in Iraq, on June 8 near Baqubah, Khan was inspecting a guard post when they observed a taxicab approaching too quickly, raising concerns that it was going to ram the guard rails and detonate an explosive device. Ordering his subordinates away from the vehicle, Khan ran forward 10–15 steps to the taxi to caution it to slow down.

His suspicions turned out to be well founded. At the wheel was a suicide bomber and the car had been rigged with a powerful remote-controlled explosive device that went off the moment Khan came close. He caught the blast before it could reach the gates or the nearby mess hall where hundreds of soldiers were eating breakfast. By that single act of bravery, he probably saved 100-200 Americans that day.

Capt. Humayun Saqib Muazzam Khan rests at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, USA. That he has not been cited for the Medal of Honor for his heroic act of sacrifice is inexplicable. Not that it matters to someone who is dead.

For those interested to lay flowers, the location of his grave is identified below….

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KHAN, HUMAYUN SAQIB MUAZZAM
CPT US ARMY
DATE OF BIRTH: 09/09/1976
DATE OF DEATH: 06/08/2004
BURIED AT: SECTION 60 SITE 7986
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

Fresh flowers around Capt. Humayun Khan’s gravestone at the Arlington National Cemetery.

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He might not have known it then, but Capt. Humayun Khan died fighting a war that is now universally recognized as an insanely unjust and unnecessary war. It is a war which has left the Middle-East in tatters, a war whose incomprehensibility shocks us and makes us wonder why those leaders who started it have not only not been convicted of war crimes and horrendous human rights abuses, but how it is possible that they are today walking freely among us – proud, strutting, puffed up men – holding forth on the lecture circuit on how they brought democracy to the Muslim world.

Instead of a prison cell at The Hague, George W. Bush drives around his Texas ranch when he isn’t appearing in TV talk shows with the Kimmels, the Fallons and the DeGenerreses of America, greeted as he steps on the stage with deafening cheers and standing ovations.

But of course. I am being naive to believe that those cells at The Hague were ever meant for folks like Bush and not just for leaders of tiny Eastern European countries and black African heads of state. After all, look at the sterling pedigree he sports – his dad, George H W Bush was the one who pardoned all those thugs in the Iran-Contra affair and prior to that, took it upon himself to persuade a US Attorney to go easy in the prosecution of one of America’s most corrupt politicians, Spiro T. Agnew.

28-yr old Capt. Humayun Khan was duped into taking part in an invasion of a sovereign country, on the side of the invaders, for reasons as blatantly and ludicrously facile as the invasion’s military code name – ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.

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But here’s the thing – in 2016 when he gave his address, Khizr Khan must have known for almost a decade that America had lied to the world about the WMD. He must have known he was being used as a pawn by the very folks at the Democratic Party who had voted for the invasion of Iraq, among them, Hillary Clinton herself. He must have realized that they were indirectly responsible for his son’s death?

Or is the message hidden inside Mr Khan’s address telling us that sacrifice, any sacrifice, is noble? That war, any war and dying in that war is heroic and must be honored, regardless of whether the hero fought for the invaders or the invaded?

“You have made no sacrifice, you have lost no one,” said the bereaved Mr. Khan, addressing Donald Trump in his speech, making it seem like there is no difference between a just and an unjust war, as if sacrifice and being martyred is all that matters.

I don’t know, help me out here – if the parents of a foot soldier in Genghiz Khan’s western divisions or Attila the Hun’s hordes made a speech about how their son gave up his life while actively engaged in the effort to subjugate and annihilate thousands in the overrun territories, were their audience then supposed to tear up?

After all, if we look closely, there is no difference between a Hun Chieftain in Attila’s legions and Capt Humayun Khan. One died securing the fig orchards in overrun Anatolia and the other gave his life securing those billion dollar no-bid reconstruction contracts for the Bechtels and the Haliburtons of America.

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When I watched Khizr Khan and his wife proudly announcing their Gold Star status, it struck me that my country of birth, India, has no such exclusive club of parents. Thousands of Indian Army soldiers die every year trying to secure their motherland’s borders against Pakistani and Chinese infiltrators, but you don’t get to see either the Indian Government or the public going overboard and forming cult-like fraternities of Gold Star families. They honor the sacrifices of their martyrs and they move on with their lives.

I am sure it’s the same on the Pakistani and Chinese sides. Neither do the Europeans nor even the Russians have anything close to ‘Gold Star’ families. America is the only nation which raises the parents of dead soldiers to a kind of God-like status.

An even bigger irony is that those American soldiers that do survive and manage to get back home, maimed and psychologically scarred, they are shunned and treated like crap by their Veterans’ Affairs Department and in general, by American society itself.

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The ancient Spartans had moms who handed their 6-year old male children over to the state, to be groomed to do battle and die as heroes. When they did inevitably die, the parents were honored – if only symbolically – pretty much like the American Gold Star parents of America today.

There is however a difference between the Spartan parents and the American parents. In the case of the Spartans, that was the law and the parents had little say in the matter. It was either give up your child to go get trained to be a soldier and die in battle or let him remain at home and have the authorities snatch him when he is an adolescent, to go work in the hazardous arsenic-laced gold and silver mines and die there. Spartan parents had little choice.

There is another huge difference – the Spartans drew their soldiers from all strata of the society, the elite as well as the hoi-polloi finding equal representation. In fact, the Spartan elite led the way. In sharp contrast, members of the American elite do everything in their power to avoid serving in the military. Remember Donald Trump and his bone spurs?

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Only one modern-day parallel to the American Gold Star parents exists and that is in North Korea. I am told that the North Koreans have a well established system of badges of honor doled out to the parents of dead soldiers. The parents walk around with those badges proudly displayed on their drab tunics and total strangers walk up to them to shake their hands.

But then, there is a distinction even in the North Korean analogy – those strangers are mandated by law to shake a Gold Star parent’s hands, unless they want to find themselves eating rotten potatoes inside a gulag.

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For America, it is a perfect win-win situation – the nation starts a war, invades another nation that was simply minding its own business half a world away and just when the body bags begin coming home and morale begins flagging, it is artificially boosted with organizations like ‘Gold Star Mothers Inc.’ and ‘Gold Star Fathers Inc.’

“Always give ’em something to look forward to, even in death”, seems to be the dictum. So what if the real hero is dead. Make his parents the heroes by giving them fancy titles like ‘Gold Star Mother’ or ‘Gold Star Father’. They’ll be thrilled when total strangers walk up to them and shake their hands and repeat the same inane bullshit…. ‘thank you for your son’s service’. It will make them forget the fact that their son or daughter died fighting a war in which they had very likely been active participants in some kind of atrocity or the other, against the innocent citizens of another sovereign nation whom they loved calling ‘gooks’ and ‘barbarians’. Remember Mai Lai? Abu Ghraib?

Perhaps those Gold Star Moms just can’t wait to be on the receiving end of those flag folding ceremonies, where three or four soldiers, members of the coffin bearing platoon, begin folding the flag that had been draped over the coffin, in an excruciatingly slow and painstaking process that takes several minutes and makes you grit your teeth.

At the end of it, the flag turns into a tightly wrapped triangular bundle that resembles a hard sofa cushion. The bundle is then handed over to the Gold Star Mom, who receives it with an expression that says she is the one who should be grateful.

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‘Gold Star’ status is a ludicrous farce, especially for a nation that does not have to worry about an invasion, since it is bound by two vast oceans on either side and friendly neighbors in the north and the south. Therefore, for an American GI mom, Gold Stars can only be won when her Li’l Billy catches a bullet between his eyes or an IED between his legs, while engaged in an act of naked aggression, against a country half a world away that never did America any harm.

My God, this has got to be the perfect jerk-off.

If I was an American parent of a dead soldier, I would respectfully refuse that triangular seat cushion flag and the freebie at the diner and I would wait my turn at the queue.

I know what I would want to be – just a father, not a “Gold Star” sucker.