Photojournalist Eugene Richards has an ongoing project at The Nation, pairing his black and white photos of Americans affected by the war at home with their own personal reflections and agony. "War Is Personal" has profiled three people so far: Tomas Young, a 26 year-old Missourian recounting an ambush in Iraq where he asked his fellow soldiers to kill him, his injuries that painful; Carlos Arrendondo, a 45 year-old Massachusetts father grieving his young, slain Marine son; and, most recently, Mona Parsons, a 52 year-old mother from Ohio trying to persuade her son not to return to Iraq.

How do we read and react to the exposure of war at home? To supremely detailed accounts of families, veterans, and caskets in America?

When a few Marines surprise you on your birthday to announce your son’s death in Iraq, and when your heart drops, thinking that the surprise was going to be Alex, in person, home from war, should asking Marines to leave your house be such an ordeal? Should asking them to leave lead to dousing yourself in gasoline, in agony? Should it lead to an explosion?

For Carlos Arrendondo, it did just that. Asking the Marines to leave was torment, but the thought of it seemed somehow productive, beyond asking "Are you sure that was Alex? Are you sure?"

As he says: 

I run back into the house, grab Alex’s picture to give it to my mom. Then seeing the uniforms, ask the Marines to please leave, leave. "Can you please leave." Perhaps I thought that if they did leave, then none of this was happening.

The voices of this war will be men like Arrendondo, I believe, if only because the articulated efforts to "Bring our Troops Home!" or to "Support Our Troops!" swirl in politics, amid disingenous suits and media-exploded figures whose sincerity is either watered down or quickly undermined by the noise machine that trumps them in the first place. Cindy Sheehan’s effort to memorialize her son with a vigil in Crawford, TX is what now? We remember it because it was on every newschannel and in every paper, crudely dissected one way or the other. But I don’t remember her voice. If anything, it was too clear: my son has died and it’s George Bush’s fault. I don’t disagree with the ultimate reasoning, just the simplicity of it. Her vigil was too buzzworthy, too easily picked-up and tossed, in its simplicity, left and right.

Try and heave Carlos Arrendondo’s reflection of his son’s death into the political climate. Try plugging it into the noise machine and getting a clear sound. That you can’t is why his voice rings for me. Whatever fact exists in his son’s death in Iraq is muddied by the lurid details of war over there and at home in Massachusetts, where Arrendondo lit himself on fire in despair. He lay in a stretcher during his son’s wake, morphine muddying his senses and his memory.

Wanting to reach him I was lifted off the stretcher and climb up to kiss him, to touch his head, his hands, his fingers, his shoulders, his legs, to see if they were still there. I lay on top of the casket, on top of my son, apologizing to him because I did nothing for him to avoid this moment. Nothing.