Please Scroll Down to See Forums Below I am at a loss. First off, allow to me explain that I am a vet, a former infantryman who has recently taken up the unappreciated task of removing unexploded ordnance from various locations. I completely understand (and appreciate) all those who want to support those of us in uniform. However, there seems to be a pretty wide gulf between those who support us by wanting us all to come home safe and those that claim to support us by wanting us to go to war (and apparently stay there, if all this PNAC stuff comes true). I am trying to figure out why the people who claim to be the most supportive of the troops seem to be content to watch us all be sent 10,000 miles away to possibly die in a war that is quite possibly the most unworthy that we have ever fought. If I actually believed that we would put a real democracy in the Middle East, maybe I would be more supportive. Call me cynical, but I just don't see it happening. I don't know you, but I must ask you to take a good look at yourselves and make the judgments that I am unable to make since I don't know you. I have met far too many of the patriots who like to bluster from the comfort of their armchair or their desk but have no real stake in sending our young people in uniform off to war. There are a good many people who support the war that have spouses or children in the military. Are you one of them? If so, do you honestly think this war is worth your life or the life of your child? What about the lives of many, many others? I don't doubt your sincerity in believing that you are patriotic, but I have to admit I must question the depth of your convictions. What are you willing to do? Are you willing to make sacrifices? Are you willing to join the military yourself or send your kids off to the military? What about submitting yourself or your children to a draft? What about paying more taxes? What about rationing? I must also question your understanding of what it means to be a patriot. If meekly stepping in line behind the President regardless of whether or not he is making bad decisions is your idea of patriotism, then I refuse to be that kind of patriot. I fail to understand how people could scream and foam at the mouth when it came to Bill Clinton and his extramarital dalliances but expect us to follow George Bush even as he leads the country over a cliff into a deep abyss where we can't even see the bottom. Any reasonable person with a decent memory and a spoonful of objectivity realizes that George Bush has violated so many of his own promises and told so many lies that it would take a multivolume set to explain them all in detail. I find it highly ironic that so many people that loudly and consistently accused Bill Clinton and Janet Reno of all the sins in the calendar can find no fault whatsoever in what John Ashcroft and the rest of the Bush administration are doing. Patriotism is more than just sticking a big American flag sticker on your SUV or flying a big American flag from the porch of your house. Any fool can do that. Patriotism is about caring what happens to your country. Patriotism is about fulfilling civic obligations, like voting, and paying taxes, and community service. It's about caring about what happens in your community and your country and doing something about it. It's about taking an active role and not just sitting back and letting others do your work for you. Patriotism means being unafraid to challenge those who lead your country astray. It means demanding the truth from our leaders, and not just blindly accepting the word of someone just because he sits in an important position, or because he claims to be an honest or God- fearing man. I tell you what. Let's assume, for a moment, that President Bush and his administration are serious about making Iraq a better place. Why on earth are we OK about spending billions, maybe tens of billions, of dollars rebuilding another country when we don't even have enough money to pay for things we need in this country? Am I supposed to believe that my tax dollars are going to pay for building new schools for Iraqi children when the quality of schools in my home state of Alabama are abysmal? Am I supposed to be ok with paying obscene amounts of money to give healthcare to Iraqis when people I know here have no healthcare to speak of? That we will spend money to build new bridges and roads in Iraq when there are bridges here in Alabama that are so bad here that the schoolbus actually has to unload the kids to cross it because the weight might cause it to buckle otherwise? Do we have to let the Bush administration bomb us before they will spend money on us? Let's assume democracy happens in Iraq. What then? Are we off to spread democracy to North Korea? Or Iran? Or Syria? how many more lives? How much more money? Are we going to rebuild all of those countries too? And just how are we going to pay for all this? When I saw the body of an American soldier lying in the road next to the tow-truck and water buffalo trailer, and the bodies of those soldiers in the Iraqi morgue, I wept. I thought about the families of those soldiers. What do they think? For your own sake, as well as the sake of myself and my fellow soldiers, start really thinking about all this. Find some answers. Then come back and tell us about it, because I would really like to know. P.S. jelli, In answer to your question, no, I am not back because I have not gone yet. I can't go into detail, but basically I was told that we were put on hold because 1. they don't feel like things are safe enough yet for us to do our work, and 2. for some reason we are not going to be allowed to do "humanitarian" clearing, only clearing in areas used by the U.S. military. Since those areas tend to be pretty safe to begin with, it leaves us little to do at the moment. Of course I understand the logic behind 1. although I think it's stupid to worry about our safety when the nature of our work is dangerous as hell. I am almost certainly more worried about some really big dud going up in my face than of some sniper who might hit me. As far as 2. goes, what I think is not fit to be printed, as it would cause me to issue such a barrage of profanity and blasphemy that I would be saying Hail Marys as penance until my retirement. Let's just say that it also makes me doubt the sincerity of those who say we are going over there to help."
letter from a friend....worth reading
- Thread starter CowboyUp
- Start date
CanadianCripple
New member
So what's the name & email of this friend of yours? He wants answers... doesn't he? Or is this a letter being circulated around the net?
c-sharp minor
Well-known member
I get dizzy looking at that.
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