Reply #9: The parents didn't think he'd be sent into combat? [View All]

[Orsino]

I'm trying to understand the vague timeline, but it seems that Eddie enlisted in the fall of 2002 or earlier, but the war in Afghanistan was in full swing, surely. They watched him march wearing a red beret, and didn't think he'd ever get to jump out of a plane into combat? If he was eighteen when he enlisted, I guess they couldn't have stopped him, but could they really have been so naive about what he was to do for a living? Could they have been hoping that there would only be one small war, and that their son might never have been deployed?

There's a lot of information that didn't make it into the story, and of course we'll never hear Eddie's side of it. He has been silenced, along with hundreds of thousands of others in these goddamned wars.