My oldest daughter and her husband (pictured above on their wedding day) will spend their first Thanksgiving as a married couple in a hospital in Texas where doctors are working to repair my son-in-law's badly injured body from the wounds he suffered in America's latest fools errand - the ongoing war in Afghanistan. It's not what any of us anticipated, but we are grateful because my son-in-law is alive and mentally intact (he has even joked by phone with my younger daughter who is due to deliver her baby literally any time now)t. Far too many young men and women are not so lucky and have either lost their lives or have suffered horrible injuries that will leave them scared physically and mentally for the rest of their lives. What makes the entire situation even more disturbing is that most Americans do not even take a momentary thought to think about our men and women in uniform. Oh yes, we hear the slogans about supporting our troops, but they in fact do not, because if they truly supported them, we would not be throwing away lives in Afghanistan and sabre rattling Republicans would not be seeking to launch a war with Iran (apparently the GOP supporters in the defense industry feel they need more sales and, therefore, war is always a good thing). And the news media is just as much at fault. Instead of focusing on the Afghanistan disaster, they prefer to follow "celebrities" who are often one stop from trailer park trash. It is all most disturbing. A column in the Washington Post looks at our military and their sacrifice. Here are some excerpts:
For nearly a decade I have had the privilege of teaching veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though they have taught me more. . . . . Not one of these men and women complained about what we asked of them.
They have, however, occasionally objected to the shameful fact that after the first few years of hostilities, these became largely invisible conflicts. In the final stages of the Iraq war and for a long time now in Afghanistan, there has been something close to media silence even as our fellow Americans continue to fight and die.
The ongoing war barely impinges on our daily discussions, and we don’t bother to argue much about our Afghanistan policy. Mostly, we hope that President Obama can keep his promise to bring our troops home.
My Thanksgiving thoughts have often turned toward my military students at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and to the thousands like them who have done very hard duty with little notice.
But this year, the gratitude that they inspire has been heightened, perhaps paradoxically, by the news about David Petraeus, his affair and the mess left behind. . . . . What has troubled me is how writing on all sides has aggravated the understandable but disturbing tendency to lay so much stress on the role of famous generals that we forget both the centrality of midlevel military leadership and the daily sacrifices and bravery of those in the enlisted ranks who carry out orders from on high.
We can show our gratitude toward these officers and their troops in at least two ways.
First, as my MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow keeps reminding us, we need to cut through what the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America calls the Department of Veterans Affairs’ “egregious failure to process the claims of our veterans” in a timely and effective way.
And we need to recognize the contribution that this new generation of veterans can make to our nation. The character of the “Greatest Generation” that fought World War II was established not by the generals or the admirals but by the officers in the lower ranks and the millions of enlisted men and women who carried into civilian life both the skills and the sense of service and community they learned in the war years.
[W]e don’t need to be nostalgic about the Greatest Generation. It’s right here among us.
And I would add that there is a third way to honor and show gratitude: get our troops out of Afghanistan and never again throw away their lives in futile and non-winnable wars such as those conducted in the Middle East for the last 12 years. We should have learned form Vietnam, by cretins like George W. Bush and war mongers like Dick Cheney (whose Haliburton compatriots have made billions) were are too stupid to learn or too focused on enriching themselves and their friends to give a damn about our troops. We also really need to reevaluate our senior ranks of the military and fire peacocks like Patraeus, et al.
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