It's Father's Day, and for most of us, that means prowling the greeting-card aisles of discount stores, maybe looking for a gift, too, and if we don't live nearby, making sure we call Dad on the day.  If we do live near, we try to visit, or maybe there's a big family to-do involving food and gifts and laughter.

But for a small sliver of our population, Father's Day is the most depressing day of the year.  In the weeks leading up to the day, the people in this group try to avoid the greeting-card section, because they won't be selecting any Father's Day cards this year.  Or next year.

Or ever.

When the slow blue sedan pulls up in front of a house or apartment complex, and a couple of soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors gets out, followed usually by a chaplain or other counselor, the family inside is usually going about their normal day.  Kids might be running through the house or playing in the yard.  A mom or a dad might be just getting out of the car from running errands, or just scraping the car keys off the kitchen table to leave for church, or a ball game, or work.  They might be watching TV or getting ready for dinner.

They are never ready.  No one is ever ready.

My own dad is a retired Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sergeant who requested (more like demanded) to serve in the Vietnam war, even though he was 40 and had five children, including a newborn baby daughter.  He came back whole and hardy, but over the course of his career, one of the jobs he held was as the notification officer.

Sitting in that car in front of the house, knowing that you are about to destroy a whole host of lives, knowing that whoever answers the door is going to scream or burst into tears or yell at you or just stand silently, gripping the doorframe as if it were a life preserver on a huge unforgiving ocean is one of the toughest jobs in the military service.

It never gets any easier, that job.  You never get used to it.

One of my husband's brothers is also retired; he was a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army Special Forces, and over the course of his distinguished career, one of his tasks for a period of time was to attend every funeral of a fallen service member.

This was, of course, before the two wars we have going right now have taken so many thousands of lives that no one man could ever attend all the funerals.

This is a man who served in the Balkans and at the beginning of the Afghanistan war, he deployed there as well, and yet, the father of two sons himself, attending these funerals was one of the most difficult jobs he ever had over his decades in the military.

Now, both of his sons are active-duty.  One has already deployed to Afghanistan and another to Iraq.  Though they both returned from their deployments sound of body and mind, either one of them could be called upon to deploy again, and again, as so many are these days.

And every time you deploy again to a war zone, you are playing Russian Roulette that THIS time, you won't make it back.

At dinner tables all over the country on this Father's Day there are empty chairs that will never again be filled by a father.  (And, we must not forget--mothers as well.)

Many thousands of children have been cheated out of having a Daddy or Mama watch them grow up, because of these wars and the multiple deployments.  They have to endure Father's Days or Mother's Days in silence and loneliness.

And that does not even COUNT the men who, today, must suffer through another Father's Day without their beloved sons or daughters; who must live with the fact that they outlived their own children.

There can be no harsher fate.

When a fallen servicemember is laid to rest under full military honors, a tri-folded flag is presented to the spouse and children, or to the parents or other family member, who are told:

"On behalf of a grateful nation, I present this flag as a token of our appreciation for the faithful and selfless service of your loved one for this country."

"On behalf of a grateful nation."

But I wonder...Just how grateful IS this nation?

Comedian Stephen Colbert's recent week in Iraq brought him the lowest ratings of his program's run, particularly among the coveted 18-34 age group.

Evening news programs ignore either war unless there is some gory B-roll they can air following some exciting battle or other.

When troops come home, when they get out of the service, when they look for jobs, they have a much harder time finding work--their unemployment is more than 11 percent now.  When they do interview for positions, they find indifferent employers who know nothing about the war and care even less.  Sometimes they even encounter hostility, as if every last one of them is a deranged Rambo, looking for a workplace to shoot up.

And when they die, nobody outside their family seems to notice or care.

You don't even see very many yellow ribbon magnets anymore.  At least with those, people could pretend that they really cared about the troops, because hey, they were patriotic, weren't they?

In fact, the entire war, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq, has become to most people something unreal, like, say, a movie or TV show.

Or video game.

Did you know that the Battle of Fallujah, (given the dramatic military-style name of "Operation Phantom Fury") which cost this country more lives than at any other time during the entire six-year-and-counting war, the definitive battle of the war in which my own son's Marine unit received more awards for bravery and heroism than the entire U.S. military, has been turned into a video game?

According to Newsweek magazine, a video game is in development by a guy named Peter Tampte of Atomic Games, called, "Six Days In Fallujah."

"Tamte is not above triviality," states the article. "A second company he runs, Destineer, makes games with titles like Indy 500 and Fantasy Aquarium. But the 41-year-old executive says he's now attempting something more serious: a documentary-style reconstruction that will be so true to the original battle, gamers will almost feel what it was like to fight in Fallujah in November 2004."

Now, in all fairness to Tampte, it must be stated that he invited a number of Fallujah Battle veterans to help him provide that realism:

"Capt. Read Omohundro, who led a Marine company in Fallujah and lost 13 men there, acts as a kind of quality-control manager for Six Days. "I'll say to them, no, that guy has to be facing the other way. This piece of ammunition doesn't blow up so fast, it only detonates this much. You can't be standing next to it when it goes off or you'll become a casualty." In Atomic's conference room, Omohundro recently described to artists and designers what Fallujah looked like when tanks kicked up dust and debris. "It's not sand like at the beach," he said. "It's that talcum-powder crap. It gets into everything. It just hangs around and you're waiting forever for it to go away."

I do not fault the soldiers and Marines who have helped this man develop his video game.  Just about every young male in existence today loves video games, and gaming provides a welcome escape for the troops who are fighting these wars.  When they come back from missions, many of them play video games to take their minds off the stress of combat.

But with all due respect to Capt. Omohundro and the others who helped Tampte, I believe they were used.  They were thinking in terms of "getting it right," which I completely understand, because if you watch any war movie, say, with most any veteran, they will get immensely frustrated at the mistakes that have been made portraying a war they themselves actually fought in.  And nothing means more to them than seeing a movie like, for instance, Saving Private Ryan, that has taken meticulous detail to get it right.

But for Tampte, let's face it, this wasn't about realism.  It was about making money. And lots of it, apparently, because the project had the backing of $20 million from investors.

While he's busy explaining that the company has been working to develop this game for four years, those of us with emotional investments in that battle are doing the math and realizing that the bodies were barely cold before a video game company was hurrying to capitalize on their sacrifices.

And everything was rocking along great guns...until a source unexpected to Tampte reared its collective head and said, Hold on.

Gold Star families.

Back during World War II, those with loved ones who were serving placed tiny flags in their windows that contained either blue stars, for each family member who was serving, or gold stars, for each family member who had been killed in action.

The Gold Star families who lost loved ones in Fallujah in November of 2004, do not find the deaths of their loved ones entertaining.

"The war is not a game, and neither was the Battle of Fallujah," the group Gold Star Families Speak Out said in a statement. "For Konami and Atomic Games to minimize the reality of an ongoing war and at the same time profit off the deaths of people close to us by making it entertaining is despicable."

"Konami is a Japanese company that distributes and underwrites mostly family-oriented games with names like DanceDanceRevolution and Karaoke Revolution. Two weeks after the publicity event, Konami's Los Angeles-based executives told Tamte in a conference call that the company was ending its involvement with Six Days. Atomic would have to find a new distributor. (Konami would not return newsweek's calls.)

"Tracy Miller, whose son, Cpl. Nicholas Ziolkowski, was killed Nov. 14, was among the Gold Star family members behind the letter. Ziolkowski had been attached to Omohundro's Bravo Company. He and other snipers had taken up position at the Grand Mosque in downtown Fallujah that morning. Dexter Filkins, a New York Timesreporter who embedded with Bravo Company, wrote that Ziolkowski had removed his helmet to get a better look in his scope when a bullet caught him in the head."

The thing is...if, during the course of the game, a "sniper" kills an American troop with a bullet in the head...Is that Cpl. Ziolkowski?

The game's creators insist that the answer would be "no," but how many Americans were killed by sniper fire during that gruesome, horrific battle?  Or small-arms fire, or rockets, or IEDs?

My son was the first one to reach his buddy, Rex, when a sniper shot him in the head during his second deployment.  Do you think HE would enjoy playing a VIDEO GAME depicting such a thing?

Dustin and I discussed this game after we'd each heard about it. 

"It bothers me," he said.  "I tried to tell myself that there are games out there about, say, D-Day, and I never said anything or thought anything about it...but this...It really bothers me."

I said, "Honey, that's because D-Day took place 65 years ago.  The Iraq War is STILL TAKING PLACE.  There are men and women who are still dying there, and those who fought in Fallujah and buried buddies are not only still dealing with that, but many of them are still in the service and are re-deploying.  Making a GAME out of their sacrifices is just wrong."

There is more bothering the Gold Star families than the lack of respect they feel from the development of this game.

(Tracy) Miller teaches a popular course on the 1960s, including the antiwar movement. She worries that Six Days, precisely because it aims to re-create the Fallujah battle so realistically, will further desensitize youngsters to the horrors of war. And she's concerned that insurgents will learn about the operational procedures of American troops.

Ahhh, and that's the kicker.  Why worry about a real war--or, God forbid, why sign up to fight it yourself--if all you have to do is sit down in the comfort of your own home and PRETEND you are fighting it?

Especially if the soldiers and Marines who are fighting and dying with the press of a button at your fingertips?  They're not REAL.

"...how can the portrayal be accurate if a player can manipulate the events? David Waddington, an assistant professor of education at Concordia University in Montreal who has written articles about the ethics of videogames, says they cannot convey important aspects of real life, including complex characters. "You do have characters in a videogame in some sense, but ... character development isn't very robust. So you don't sympathize with characters very much."

In other words, that dark blue sedan is never going to pull up to YOUR front door.

Making it "realistic" does not, in my opinion, help people really understand.

How can you POSSIBLY understand without the FEAR?  The gut-wrenching, bowel-clenching terror of heading out on patrol each and every day, street by street, house by house, room by room?  Who's gonna get it today?  You?  Your buddy?  Your platoon leader?   They reference Dexter Filkins in that article, who was, in my opinion, one of the finest war correspondents over there.  He wrote for the New York Times, and I used to search for his stuff every day and read it.  He went right into the mouth of the beast and he was respected by the troops.  He and one outfit got pinned down by insurgents in one hellish day that saw the deaths of several of the men he was with.  When his photographer e-mailed back some photos to the Times and they put them up on their website, families protested, and he was yanked out of Iraq within days.  He wrote a book about his experiences there, and how, over time, he just slowly lost his mind.   You can't put that in a game.  

And, ultimtaely, it is a GAME.  What I resent in the first place is the almost orgasmic delight the media had in playing out this war through cool graphics and intrepid camera crews in the early days, like it was some kind of neato John Wayne movie (who did not, himself, fight in World War II even though he was old enough) or, yeah, a video game.  

What that did was give the war a feel to the public that it WAS a game or a movie and somehow not really real.  Casualties were hidden from camera crews and embedded coverage was carefully controlled, and the whole thing just seemed like a giant PR project.   

Slap a yellow magnet on your car and you, too, can support the troops!!!  

Like a football game.  America vs. Terrorists.  Popcorn!  Beer!  Rah-rah-yay!  

Until the Battle of Fallujah.  And that changed everything because it was bloody and horrible, and everyone--even field doctors and medics--were changed forever by the things they saw in Fallujah.  

I'll never forget Dustin telling me about finding two insurgents in a mosque and rounding them up, taking them prisoner.  "I looked into the eyes of one of the men," he said, "and he was absolutely terrified.  And I wondered if I looked the same way to him."  

Until those avid gamers know what it's like for bullets to come right at them out of the TV screens and blow the head off the buddy sitting on the couch next to them, then there IS no "realism."  Because that's the only "realism" that matters to me.  

Mr. Tampte's investors pulled out their financial backing after the Gold Star families formally protested the game, and he has not, as yet, been able to line up new ones.  He is struggling to save his business, and bewildered because he's convinced himself that what he was really doing was "honoring" the troops who served in Fallujah.  

If he really wants to honor them, he should attend a few funerals.  He should stand right behind a weeping family member who is handed the tri-corner flag--close enough that he can hear, "On behalf of a grateful nation..."  

He should go home, then, with some of the widows and widowers, watch their suffering children in their subdued and silent play.  

He should watch them walk past the greeting-card aisle on Mother's Day or on Father's Day as they hurry past, averting their eyes, fighting back tears.  

War is not a game.  Father's Day with an empty chair at the table is all too real.