You and I and our best friend are on patrol in Iraq

You and I are on point leading our squad, our best friend is in the rear of the squad because he has been in country for 15 months and is do to go home next month. Suddenly there is an explosion behind us, we set up for a fight with the enemy, but there is no one to fight back against. Our best friend is blown away in pieces on the ground. Dead.

Would you have feelings of rage, helplessness, hopelessness.
Would you ever forget this day?.

This is what our troops face everyday, buddies getting killed, and they have no identifiable enemy to fight back against. WTF?

Peace

There are no heroes in a war like Iraq.

This is a war fought for so long without any concrete strategy - Robert Fiske pointed out that Bush's whole strategy is to have our service people drive up and down the long dusty highways until they are under attack.


Those who live through the constant re-deployments will and are coming home as empty shells.
The soul puled out from under them and their minds chewed up like so much hamburger.

They will not make good marriage partners, or fathers, or mothers.

Their own inner pain will trump the resources of the human spirit to repair unimaginable injuries.

May God have mercy on them and on ours for allowing them to be put in harm's way.

http://www.cmohs.org/recipients/jldunham.htm- Marine Corp Corporal Jason L. Dunham
Threw himself on a grenade to protect his fellow marines

http://www.cmohs.org/recipients/paulrsmith_cit.htm- United States Army Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith
Stayed at a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a damaged armored personnel carrier to give his unit time to set up a proper defense.

I would like to thank you for posting that.

Glad to have you join us.

participate in an illegal war launched based on lies.

The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors

Those are the real heroes in my opinion.

Sorry but i can not put a conscientious objector in that category. Besides if there are any C O's in Iraq they are still in harms way, there are no front lines.

A CO is someone who refuses to take the life of another during an armed conflict. Many COs have served on and near the front lines of armed conflicts, they just do their jobs w/o a weapon.

I believe that you may already know this, but I just wanted to clarify because your post sounded a bit like you thought that COs were cowards.

Most CO's during WWII were assigned as Medics (all medics were unarmed, regardless of CO status). So, yes... I *would* want one next to me.

But wars are all different. Today there is no draft.

Are unarmed CO's allowed in firefights? If not, wanting one next to you is a moot point, yes?

All I have to say is that we broke it, we need to fix it.

State had numerous reports that "nation building" was impossible, but they fabricated wmd intelligence to invade anyway.

That pattern continues, as they break, and we must fix, and they break, and we must fix.

No more of that. Not for a second.

The Russians, the French, the Germans, and most of the world thought that he was in possession of WMDs.

He fooled us all and now we are paying the price for his actions.

The Russians, French and Germans were against the invasion. That is why they couldn't use the UN to get a resolution and had to come up with the WMD lies in the first place. Hans Blix and Scott Ritter were screaming to all the world that there was no evidence of WMD.

He once said that those who do things that we who have not experienced war judge to be heroic are not heroic but we judge them that way because we don't understand war at all.

He went on to report:

If you throw yourself on a grenade, it may look like the ultimate sacrifice. You have sacrificed yourself for others.

But a soldier who is tired, hungry, battle-shocked, dives on the grenade because he wants out.

And what better way to get "out" than to finalize it yourself.

and frankly, I do not feel that way at all.

When I was on active duty and deployed to Somalia, I was never closer to anyone (outside of my blood family) than I was to my platoon. Now that I am in the National Guard, I am starting to feel that way about some of the guys I am working with now.

I would like to think that if the circumstance came I, I would have been able to throw myself on a grenade, if I knew it would allow my people to come back home alive.





And that is what SFC Smith told his people, that he would do EVERYTHING he could to make sure that they all made it home.

There are heroes.

However think of all the energy that is expended on war-related maters.

If instead that could be thrown into peaceful operations, what a great world it would be.

The BAttle of the Bulge meant my Dad didn't eat or sleep for several days. When he looked back onit, he would mmuse that if ONLY that energy could have gone into something other than killing (bnot that he didn't understand why that was the msision, but still)

There are small episodes of heroism there every day that no one hears about.

Many pretend to, but it doesn't affect them.

A sad state of affairs.

It's kind of what the Colonial militias did until the American army had been established and trained.

It would be a day I wouldn't forget, and I would feel helpless and hopeless, but my rage would be directed at those who put me into this hell, those are the real enemy.

Almost forty years later, sometimes that is the first thing you see when you awake.

Before you even open your eyes.

And you really wonder about yourself and what you could have changed the outcome of that Day(s).

See My Lai.

Your the first.