Stars & Stripes LTE: Fort Sill spouse says Iraq mission not essential

Not many spouses have dared to put their name to paper in Stars & Stripes. That takes guts. Unless we see major changes in Congress in November, we'll all be reading about fourth and fifth deployments to Iraq/Afghanistan.

There's another good letter after this one--"Administration mishandled the war"

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=125&article=37673

Iraq mission not essential

I have spent two of the last three years without my husband. He is serving his second tour in Iraq. I am not a complainer, but I am absolutely fed up with the Army. Everyone seems quick to point out that soldiers “signed up” for this. When my husband joined the Army, deployments were few and far between and even when they did occur, six months was the absolute worst-case scenario. No one ever dreamed of yearlong deployments, time after time.

It is nearly impossible for a marriage to survive under these conditions. I am an independent woman, but I got married so that I could share my life with my husband. The only sharing we are able to do is by short phone calls or e-mails.

Iraq is totally different from any other deployment. The Navy goes out and floats around in the ocean for six months. Big deal. The Army is “boots on the ground” in a war zone. It’s bad enough that my husband is taken away for a whole year, but the stress of worrying about him is nearly incapacitating at times. No one is safe in Iraq.

The consequences and fallout from Iraq will be seen for decades to come. The children left without fathers or mothers, the maimed and crippled soldiers whose lives have been forever changed, the breakup of homes and families, and the resulting psychological problems will haunt America for years to come.

There is nothing in Iraq worth the life of one American soldier. There are so many problems at home in the United States that should be fixed before we worry about what is going on half a world away. Imagine the good that those billions of dollars could do at home.

Bottom line: My husband signed up to protect and defend the United States of America. America was not attacked by Iraq or Saddam Hussein. Following is a quote from George H.W. Bush’s 1998 book “A World Transformed”: “I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad. … To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter day Arab hero … assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.” No truer words were ever spoken.

Debbie Ray
Fort Sill, Okla.


Administration mishandled war

I am writing in response to the letter “Third Clinton term laughable” http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=125&article=37476 published May 26. Several points were made about Bosnia, Somalia and Iraq that are totally bogus, but space allows addressing Iraq only.

The military conflicts in the ’90s “were nothing compared to what we are facing now” as the letter writer put it, not because Iraq is filled with “people who are willing to blow themselves up to kill other people” but because the war was mismanaged by the secretary of defense. Last time I checked, improvised explosive devices are mostly remotely detonated, not strapped to an Iraqi national. IEDs and car bombs outnumber traditional suicide attacks 100 to 1 in Iraq.

The secretary of defense and president did not want to send enough troops into the theater to secure the peace, because all that the top civilian brass cared about was winning the war. For all the fear of weapons of mass destruction, there was a complete lack of planning and manpower for securing this alleged threat. Had the 4th Infantry Division been in place to secure the porous Iraqi borders (to prevent foreign fighters from entering), secure ammunition dumps full of artillery shells and other materiel used in IEDs, and if the Coalition Provisional Authority had not disbanded the Iraqi army (not to mention losing $8 billion), the continuing problems our comrades face would be substantially reduced.

Ditto-heads would do themselves a great service by reading “Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq” by Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor. And in response to the writer’s query, I can name the presidents on the “Roaring ’20s”: Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. I know this not because I looked it up, but because I read, instead of looking at history through the “prism” of the Rush Limbaugh program.

Aaron Childers
Ramstein Air Base, Germany

As an army wife, I agree.

One question though... shouldn't the headline read "Fort SILL spouse..."? Or am I missing something?

You'd think the shower would have helped~.

I thought I was seeing things. My brain has felt very fried lately -- maybe I'm not the only one ;)