So hard to imagine in 2000 that my nation and my people would be in this place today. I grew up in a time when my nation mourned Vietnam. When our vets huddled in broken groups at VA hospitals and we lost them and lost them and lost them some more and everybody said never again after seeing the broken and hearing what they broke and what broke them.
These military folk are very alien to me, but with each passing day they become more mine and I fit in here less and less because they need me more than you do. If being a liberal or a progressive or a Democrat has ever been about anything at all for me it is about compassion because things are always going to break and fall apart. There will be more wars because we are human beings and a lot more flawed than any of us can ever really imagine. The best I can hope for is that my nation doesn’t start any more or get involved in any after this.
Our soldiers and their families are in between a rock and hard place. My husband wasn’t ever going to go back to Iraq ever again until Haditha and America was fully awakened. War crimes in Iraq will not get a pass. See, that made it possible for my husband to do his job again without having to worry about any commander or peer getting away with doing a war crime number on anyone. When one soldier in a group has no give or budge on what is okay to do he/she changes the dynamic of everyone serving with them too. Bad things happen and continue to happen when no one speaks out.
How will we get out of Iraq and when? I don’t know. There are a zillion different scenarios and though each one of us hopes and believes that our ideas are the best I think all we can do from here is pray that what ever Gods hear all of us, they will not allow Iraq to go up like kindling and ignite the entire middle east. My husband does serve though every day and I never thought I would ever find myself standing here among the stressed and broken and so far from most of you. Awol soldiers go to jail. I wish this was Vietnam and the draft had them going lightly on deserters but it isn’t and they won’t. If you volunteered don’t think for one minute you won’t go to jail the minute you go Awol and they get you. Each soldier must decide where he/she will do the most good in the grand scheme in shutting this sucker down. Watada is doing his good where he is, he is giving his full measure. Please keep in mind as things unravel further that 70% of the military doesn’t want jack to do with this insanity called Iraq anymore and they are giving their full measure too. It is a nightmare gone all wrong though.
I’m sorry for my sensitivity and my neediness at times. That is who military families are at the moment and because so many of you are not happy with your military I suppose that doesn’t help much. I used to be able to balance it out better but it has gone on too long – this Iraq mess, friends on the list of the dead today. They didn’t get out last year and go to work for the contractors making the big bucks so I know they died giving their full measure as well. Hollow eyed, bleak expressions, nobody in the neighborhood flies their flag anymore.
I need to write, but somewhere that isn’t yours because I don’t think you can handle my writing and I can’t handle that you can’t handle my writing. I live in a sort of no mans land right now, I think most of the military is. I don’t think it’s as bad as the contractors family up the street making the big bucks because she seems to be drunk 24/7. If you guys think you dislike me sometimes, I couldn’t hold a candle to how much she probably feels disliked around my place. I want to tell them to shove their $12,000 a month up their ass. Probably much like you sometimes want to tell me to shove my husband’s and the family’s sacrifices up our ass over something like Iraq.
Someday we will heal. I know we will, and we will all sit at the same table again and break bread. We will shrug and feel sad and hug about what we all endured when this mess is over. I saw that after Vietnam when the nation began to assimilate everything that had happened.
We can’t fix what has already been broken and destroyed. All that we can do every day from here on out is our best. Knowing that George W Bush is going to be remembered as the worst president in our nation’s history doesn’t put balm on anything for any of us when we are busy surviving him. It’s hard for any of us to heal when each day is a fresh wound. I have no brave words to share. If driving to the Son of a Bitch’s ranch in Crawford and getting arrested would change anything this time, end a surge and start redeployments back to the states, I would be on the road now instead of writing to you all.
I did meet someone though on my trip to George’s and she was such a special lady. She warned me! She told me! This is going to be long and it is going to be hard and that Crawford was just a beginning. She was too polite and well spoken to add that this was really going to suck a lot too. Nah! She didn’t need to say that. She warned me enough so that I wouldn’t get too shocked when it became very hard and very long, she told me just what I needed to know to stay on this road. My husband said that the Crawford bunch is whole bunch of loonies, we were a big bunch of revolutionaries desperately in need of some evolutionaries to help us out with the day to day things this struggle requires. All I can say to him is, “So What!” We’re trying to find them on the road to that first supper.