He looks and sounds like the kind of young man that most any father would be proud to call his son.
Kevin Landeck was 26, but the fresh-faced Army captain looks much younger in a recent family photo. He looked after his men and wanted to bring them home alive. The incompetence of the Bush administration angered him, he wrote in emails to his family.
After Kevin Landeck was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, his father wrote President Bush a letter.
When Kevin’s father Richard Landeck did not get a response from the president, he sent the letter to a columnist with The Chicago Tribune:
I had many conversations with Kevin before he left to serve as well as during his deployment. The message he continued to send to me was that of incompetence. Incompetence by you, (Vice President Richard) Cheney and (former Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld. Incompetence by some of his commanders as well as the overall strategy of your decisions.
When I asked him about what he thought about your decision to “surge” more troops to Baghdad, he told me, “until the Iraqis pick up the ball, we are going to get cut to shreds. It doesn’t matter how many troops Bush sends, nothing has been addressed to solve the problem he started.”
Answer me this: How in the world can you justify invading Iraq when the problem began and continues to lie in Afghanistan? I don’t want your idiotic standard answer about keeping America safe. What did Sadaam Hussein have to do with 9/11? We all know it had to do with the first Iraq war where your father failed to take Sadaam down.
Snip
You or Cheney or Rumsfeld will never know the anguish, the worry, the sleepless nights, the waiting for the loved one who may never return. If the soldiers were able to do their jobs and the ego’s of politicians like you, your “cronies” and some commanders had their heads on straight, we would be out of this mess which we should not be involved with in the first place.
My family and I deserve and explanation directly from you……not some assistant who will likely read this and toss it. This war is wrong.
I want you to look me and my wife and daughter directly in the eye and tell me why my son died. We should not be there, but because of your ineptness and lack of correct information I have lost my son, my pride and joy, my hero!
I’ve said before, no torment in hell can probably match the suffering of losing a child. I certainly cannot imagine it and I’ll hold my children tighter tonight when I see them because of this.
Richard Landeck and his wife went to their first peace rally this past weekend.
They have already paid a price and the truth is that no matter how many of us protested before the war, we could not stop Bush from the war. He lied to the American people and many wanted to believe him. Good and decent people in the United States, Britain, and Iraq have suffered as a result.
For the Landecks, it is too late. How many more Kevins are going to die for Bush’s lies?