Why It Hurts
Deborah Venable
10/13/09
I
read a story last week that hurts. It
should hurt every American who reads it.
Military chaplains are “speaking out” in Afghanistan “because the troops
can’t” according to the story. You can
read it here, American
Soldiers Losing Heart
in Afghanistan.
Peppered throughout this story is the same theme – why are we here? What is the mission?
I’m
reminded of the same theme running through many minds during the Vietnam War as
well. We veterans, (including wives and
families of those brave souls), who survived that awful war were too often kept
in the dark on purpose at the time.
With so much negativity directed at that fight, even those who saw the
clear purpose had trouble clinging to optimism at times. The striking differences are these:
That
war was waged against the brutal enemy of creeping communism, and most of the
people fighting it had been recently schooled in that enemy. Not that they all came away with the
understanding of what a loss would mean, but they at least understood what
victory was all about. America always
won! That war also claimed many more
lives than this one, and a great number of soldiers fighting it had not
volunteered for military service – much less the whole dying for your country
thing.
Fast
forward to today. These soldiers ARE
all volunteers. None of them were
forcibly drafted to fight. Most of them
joined out of a sense of duty after their homeland had been brutally attacked
by the enemy they were sent to fight.
Some of them have even grown up in the aftermath of that attack and
joined when they became old enough. The
war is, after all, eight years old now.
It
hurt to read that story because it is filled with hopelessness. The troops who feel this way are not
expecting to win. They also have no
clear idea just what a loss would mean.
The
people who founded America and those who later had to defend it knew both these
things. They had a clear knowledge of
winning and losing, and they fought most of their battles on the land they were
protecting. Those who came behind them
learned that the battles had to be taken to foreign lands sometimes to keep the
battles away from their homelands. In
fact, many modern members of our military will tell you that the reason they
fight in far away places is so that we won’t have to fight here at home.
That
lesson has been all but lost on much of the American public in general. They have been so pampered by modern
academia that they truly think humans should be above all that war stuff
nowadays. In much the same way that
anti-hunters think meat products in a supermarket haven’t really required the
slaughter of animal life, these morons think peace and liberty may be easily
purchased with a currency of passivity that does not now, nor will ever exist.
Everything
in life is a fight. We have to fight
just to be born. We have to fight
sickness and death to stay alive. For
those who have never seen death overtake a living person, I can assure you that
the last thing on earth you will ever do is fight for that last breath of
air.
Pacifists
who ask us all to believe that peace can someday settle over all humanity if we
just stop fighting each other are spitting in the face of reality. There are things that will cause a rational
human to “walk away” from a fight.
Those things include a respect for the opposition, fear of the
opposition, or ignorance of and/or hopelessness for our own situation.
So,
for which reason should those rational Americans among us choose to walk away
from the fight in Afghanistan?
Do
we respect and/or fear the opposition – those despicable terrorists types with
no respect for human life? We don’t
think folks like that would follow us home?
Just what is our situation? Do
we know why our soldiers are there? Do
they? We’ve already been told that far
too many of our soldiers are consumed with hopelessness. Why is that? Is it our fault, their fault, or the politicians who sent them
there who are the most to blame?
I
am sickened and hurt by the thought that many Americans haven’t got the good
sense to just to want to win any more!
If you are not for what the opposition represents, then you certainly
should be for winning the fight against them.
We cannot continue to support as a viable solution the laying down of
arms and walking away from a brutal enemy.
That will never bring peace or justice, and it will bring that
enemy ever closer to our homeland. And
on that note, when he gets here, would you rather I had my gun to fight him off
for you, or will you continue to insist that I give it up so that you may feel
safer?
It
hurts that any free people would wish to see their obvious enemy better armed
than their own neighbors. Yes, it
really is all wrapped up together in the constant battle to live free. We fight wars for a purpose. The fact that politicians can get rich on
power and money via the manipulation of those wars is not any justification for
demanding that the fight is wrong.
Afghanistan
has dragged on for far too long. It is
time to get it over with by allowing us to win it. Let’s see if the politicians can get it
right this time. I think the
politicians have far more important things to do than figuring out how to
disarm the American people and make us wards of the state. That is where their time is now being spent,
though.
Meanwhile
soldiers and citizens alike are getting more and more hopeless.
It
hurts.