SHADOWS OF DOUBT
My father went to Vietnam. After being there during the tumult in ’68, he was a real fortunate son who came home in ’69. My father had few if any visible injuries; the psychological scars, though, are legible to my family and me to this day, some 38 years after his return. Make no mistake about it, we ARE VERY GRATEFUL for his duty and his safe return, and after reading The Day’s “Coming Home Wounded,” courtesy of the Associated Press, sometimes I don’t think we know how grateful we are. In short, the human price for war manifests itself in many different forms.
As the blogger at Drinking Liberally in Milford has duly noted this week, the troops recognize the failure of this war more so now than ever. They want and deserve to come home especially now that it’s become apparent that all benchmarks, reports, and first-hand accounts suggest Iraq spirals in failure.
Some officials are trying to do something about the war aside from just debating and spinning. Thanks to Senator Jim Webb’s proposed legislation, if soldiers were to be re-deployed, they at least deserve a well-earned rest. But no thanks to certain hawks, including Insane in the Membrane Captain Lieberman, that legislation never came to pass.
It seems that the troops don’t believe in the mission any more. It seems that their shadows of doubt arise from authentic experience, not press room spin. It seems that they are grounded in reality whereas Chimpy and toddler company continue in their arrested development of temper tantrums and ego-mania. It seems we need to listen to the soldiers’ misgivings, for they are, after all, on the front line.
