Brotherhood of Pain and Pride

There is a Brotherhood of "having been there" and having returned, never quite unscathed, bearing a burden no civilian can quite grasp. We witnessed, endured, and yes, even committed atrocities that haunt us to this very day, and it hits us hardest on this Memorial Day, while the masses crowd into the stores to take advantage of huge savings. As I sit here typing this, the one horror that occupies my mind the heaviest is picturing those young men mounting up in convoy to drive supplies from point A to point B along the shooting galleries of Iraq, knowing that at lest one of them will not make it to their destination. If you applied for a job and the interviewer told you upfront that you were going to be a fish in a barrel for several years and the chances were good that coming home in one piece was the rule rather than the exception, would you be happy to take the job?

We are proud of ourselves and our comrades, regardless of the fact that many of us realize, some even in hard-thought retrospect, that our service was pointless, and that many of our friends died for all the wrong reasons, even serving our country for all the right reasons. Many of us were drafted, many of us volunteered, but I do not discriminate between the two, because dead applies equally to both. The damage to our psyche's weigh heavily on us all. Those that had the arguable guts to say "fuck this shit" and headed to Canada......yes, even those bear a burden. You may notice that it is rare that any elected leader this country has had that served in the military started a war. When you have tasted the reality of war, you do not easily commit your comrades to the sacrifices such endeavors call for. All a soldier asks is that if he must die, that he leaves behind a better world than he was born in. How many of us get to do that?

I have far more respect for the civilian truckers who drive those rigs in Irag, and suffer the same consequences as our soldiers, than I have for Donald Rumsfield.
I want that son-of-a-bitch to ride with one convoy that gets hit with a roadside bomb. I don't even care if he gets through it without a scratch. I just want him to get on one of those humvees or tanker trucks with the same chances of getting his flesh scattered across the highway as the soldiers that do it every day over there. I want him to witness first hand the horror of being so helpless in the face of these kind of assaults. Then, I want him to return, and vow never to attempt to avail himself of the kinds of mental health care that these guys need when they return, and never get. I want some fucking empathy in this government.

Brothers, I am not "celebrating" this holiday. I am at home thinking of you. I am remembering with you. And I am mourning with you and for you. I will never forget those I served with, and those I never knew. I will never forget those of you we left behind, and I will never forget what these wars have turned some of you into. We are all monsters waiting to get out. I salute those of you who made it back with your monsters kept safely inside. And I forgive those of you who couldn't. I cannot claim to have faired any better.

Those of you with your yellow ribbons and "support our troops" bumper stickers, all I ask of you is one thing.......bring my Brothers home.