Military Families Live in Dread, While the Rest of America is Busy Shopping

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/13/3147/

Military Families Live in Dread, While the Rest of America is Busy Shopping
by Gary Younge

Mom,

I had another friend die today from a massive ied {improvised explosive device} and many more wounded with shattered bones and scrapes. We used to be in the same platoon. 1st platoon and the same squad when I first arrived at fort hood for a good 7 months or so. He was 17 then and barely a day over 19 now that he has passed away.

It’s tearing me up so badly inside. I just can’t stand it. I can’t get rid of the feeling that I probably won’t make it home from this war. I have this horrible feeling that his fate will soon become my own. I don’t want to die here Mom. Don’t tell Erin bc I know it will devastate her. But if somehow I don’t make it, I want you Mom and Dad and all the family and especially Erin to know I love you all so so much and appreciate everything you all have done for me in the thick and thin.

The most important thing I want you all to do, is to use all of your connections to do everything in your will to use my death as a tool with the media to end this pointless war. Contact Michael Moore or whomever it may be to get the word out about how disgusted with our government I am about forcing us to come here to wait for death to claim us. I want it to end. How many more friends, sons, daughters, mothers, and dads must die here before they say it’s enough? And if you don’t die, the worst part you have to live with is the guilt of surviving. Surviving this war and not dying like your buddies to your left and to your right in combat.

I love you all so so much.

love,

Zach

Wednesday August 8 2007, Baghdad

‘Death,” said Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, “has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”

snip//

On Friday the president’s new war adviser, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, said it was time to think about restoring the draft.

“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” he said, suggesting that some soldiers’ families could soon reach breaking point themselves. “And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table.”

There is gruesome irony in the fact that such a possibility should come from an administration headed by a president who dodged the draft and a vice-president who “had other priorities” than serving in Vietnam. But American conservatives have a curious inability to put their children where their mouth is when it comes to the war. All of the main Republican contenders back it; none of their children are in it.

On the day that Zach sent his email home, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney addressed a town hall meeting 50 miles from his home town. Romney was asked why none of his children are serving in the military. “One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president,” he said.

[Solly Mack]

1. Makes you bitter

[ladjf]

2. A lot of us are very weary trying to figure out how to make ends

meet while doing our best to cope with a miseries of having a President who is turning the Country into a fascist dictatorship.