We Will Reclaim Our Armed Forces!

[bemildred]

This is how I feel about our soldiers.
This guy makes me proud of our troops.

I say that because while my bumper sticker says impeach, what I really want to see - for these people who are presiding over yet another generation of our kids being sent abroad to do their criminal wet work - what I really want to see is George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin and Condoleeza I-forgot-who-I-am, Paul Wolfowitz, and cabinet members old and new… slammed up against a wall, searched as roughly as an Iraqi detainee, put in handcuffs, and their sorry asses thrown into a cell at Guantanamo Bay… after we give it back to Cuba.

Our job is not to be conciliatory. We are not diplomats. Our job is not to comfort the comfortable by reinforcing their denial. Our job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Because we were there. We know what these people have sent our children to do, and what they have sent our children to become.

And I'm not whining about that. I'm not going to cry about what was done to me, because the upside to it is that I'm grateful to the dominant class for my military career. I'm grateful for my education. I'm grateful to be a soldier… I'm just not their soldier any more.

On my 19th birthday, I left McCord Air Force Base to begin my international studies program in northern Bin Dinh Province. My professors were a Black buck sergeant named Eaves, a professional con-man named Westmorland, and the courageous and patriotic soldiers of the NLF and NVA who taught me what it looks like to say NO. I learned that a person can put one foot in front of the other for a long time. I learned that mosquito clouds and thirst and sleeping in the mud won't kill you. I learned to accept my own mortality. I learned that what most of suburban America thinks is extreme and exceptional hardship is the daily reality of most of the world… and I began the process of learning that the comfort of those suburbs comes at a price often paid by those we never see and whose hardship we cannot comprehend.

BringThemHomeNow

[lindashaw]

1. I just now found Stan Goff's piece in Truthout. Oh, my...

It was the Bring Them Home Now group that first sent my husband and me to Crawford back in August of 2002. I've read Stan's stuff before, and he is brilliant. All of us should get behind these vets. They've paid their dues. God bless 'em.

[bemildred]

2. I think he gives some people cognitive disconnect.

Like Smedley Butler in "War is a Racket". It's just too
disconcerting to consider the idea that our rulers are just
as big a bunch of assholes as rulers in general have been
throughout history. Americans were not always such a bunch
of gullible sheep, they used to know the score.

Edit: at least more of them did.