My Tears Have Ended
Damn, Just Damn will take you to a NYTime.com article on some pictures of Iraq vets. I’ve never done a post that had a disclaimer saying don’t open the link with kids around. This is it. Don’t. I think you have to register to get the article, but they don't require more than an Email address and user name.
My tears have ended. I found the link at Pole Hill Sanitarium. Read Doc, he’s good.
Here’s an expanded version of my comment on his post.
I was deferred at the very tail end of the Vietnam war, first 2D, then 4D, if you are interested in what they mean, go to Google. To me they meant that I got a nice college education, in this country, rather than Canada. I lost a buddy from high school to that war. After, a friend of mine came back from it, eating ten or fifteen pills a day to deal with the after effects of his service. He, and we, never knew which "he" would show up on any given day.
I have a friend today that has some shattered knees from his service. The good news, they cause him to miss hit an occasional golf shot letting me beat him.
My Father served our country in World War II. He started out building the Alaskan Highway, then went to Europe, in several waves past the first. As I am alive, he didn’t get killed.
My brother was a Marine, just after Vietnam ended. A cousin served in the Army in Germany in the late Sixties.
I’m the guy in the family and the community that didn’t do his “bit,” to use a term even older than I am.
People died in my Father’s war. People were horribly disfigured. People were maimed. Though possibly disingenuous, I can live with that. I’m alive and free because of their sacrifice.
All of the same things happened in Korea. Then, I think we got a bit too big for our britches.
Vietnam, Grenada, and it got worse and worse. We started the fights. They ended badly. We seem to do it again and again, not learning the lesson that the entire world is not ours.
Here’s the problem. “Us,” is now us old guys, the old guys I used to hate when I was at risk of going to Vietnam to fight their war, a war that should have never started, as is the case in Iraq.
So, while I can “live with” the losses of my Father’s war, I can’t live with the waste of our current egocentric adventure. The waste? Look at the pictures in the link. Tell me what they bought.
5 comments:
Sometimes I have people ask me why I don't post more about the war. That picture I used says far more than a month's worth of posts ever could.
I don't know what to say. The photographs say so much more.
And people thought I was wrong, because I went and faced down the recruiter who tried to get my 17-year-old son to enlist...my brother was a marine recruiter, so I know a little about recruiters...and yet, I have a great-nephew, just 9 days older than my sons, who is a marine in Falujah, on his third (?) tour of duty...and for what? For oil, of course...and nevermind the PTSD, and all the other psychological wounds of this war...
What seems now like a lifetime ago, I initially thought we belonged in Vietnam. By 1967-68, I had changed my mind and come to the realization it should never have been part of our country's agenda. Today, I am even more adamant that we have no earthly business in Iraq or any other country for that matter, trying to tell them how to run their affairs. My theory is if they want a form of government like ours, even just along the same lines, let them flesh it out on their own. By feeling this way does not -as many will assert - mean I do not support our troops there because I do -they're doing what they were hired on to do when they enlisted and have no control over where they are sent, what their orders are anymore than you or I have control over this war. But I do believe everything possible should be done to show our government that our presence there is doing nothing, overall, than creating more animosity world-wide towards the U.S. Had Iraq actually attacked us, my thought process would be different but they didn't and therefore, this is a private war of Dubya's, born for whatever reason, and as such should be ruled for what it is -immoral and illegal -if there is such a thing as an "illegal" war.
When you said not to open it with kids around, I knew it was bad. So I didn't open it.
I have not been able to watch a war movie since the war in Iraq started. I've never watched Army wives and even that show Jericho got to me after a couple of episodes and I just couldn't watch it. I bought Pearl Harbor after taking my younger two kids to see it...it's just gathering dust.
All I have to do is look at a picture of my son or check on him after his latest medical appointment and the Iraq war is more vivid to me than any movie or TV show.
And I STILL wouldn't wish it upon Bush's daughters.
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