...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Tuesday, July 08, 2003
      ( 1:16 PM )
 
A Letter from Iraq

Daily Kos is right: the headlines are almost becoming mundane these days. But then I read this today at Guerilla News Network. Take the time to read it.

After a while, you begin to understand the current
troubles in Iraq from the perspective of the grunt on
the ground. It’s not what you might think. The U.S.
soldiers aren’t being hailed as liberators and warmly
embraced by the vast majority of the population. Nor
are they raping Iraqi women or indiscriminately shooting
at anything that moves. They’re ordinary soldiers trained
to kill cast into inordinately complex situations.

[...]

From the humanitarian projects they carry out to the surgical
early-night body snatches they conduct, they’re in many
cases doing things for which they have no training or experience.

I fear the soldiers in Iraq are not just there occupying a country, but fighting for their very survival... I fear that they are barely making it sometimes. I'm sure they must feel so taken for granted. The surge of "support our troops!" that happened when the invasion began - to the point of claiming that those of us against the attack did NOT support the troops - seems to have died away. Adding insult to injury, in the short time the troops have been in Iraq, BushCo has cut veterans benefits, lowered their "danger-pay," and not given any increase to the mere $6000 a family receives when a soldier is killed in active duty. It's up to the families now to wait and hope their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, boyfriends, girlfriends, partners, friends will come home safe - no one in the administration seems to care. Gen. Tommy Franks callously repeated George Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt, and supports BushCo's ridiculous line not increasing troop counts in Iraq. What general, what soldier thinks it's a good idea not to have a good amount of back up troops in a situation like we're facing? I'm no military planner, but would some run of the mill common sense even be a part of the government's plan for our soldiers?

This is a shout out to all of you who have loved ones overseas in the service of this country. Thank you. My father did (for 30 years) and my brother does this job without complaint, as do thousands of others who have given up families, home, even their jobs and the pay that gets their family by every month, in order to serve as they promised to do. But the longer we misuse them, the further our government goes ignoring them, allowing them to be targets in a quagmire that is not being made any better by the civilian structures that had promised to do so, then the less and less the possibility is that there will be enough soldiers there for us when we really do need them...and appreciate them. Thank you, wherever you are, for doing what even our leader was unwilling to do.

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