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Edited on Sat Aug-26-06 05:12 PM by shadowknows69
Cleaning up the hornet nest that someone else kicked
Had two soldiers in my cab a week or two ago right before the recent deployment, young men who couldn’t be more than twenty on their way to their first combat tour in Iraq. These two seemed to have a very good grasp on the dangers they might soon be facing. They told me they we’re being deployed to the same area that the soldiers who raped and killed the fourteen year old girl committed their vile and evil act. These guys definitely knew that they were in for rougher times than most of their peers due to the fact that the entire area, not surprisingly, now viewed the US as “the enemy”. Hearts and minds would not be won in this area. The “sins of the father”, or earlier warriors in this case, would be visited upon the next ones with all the vengeance they could muster.
Obviously the two soldiers expressed their fear of this and their disgust with the actions of these few murderous thugs our army was stupid enough to recruit. Sadly I also got a sense of them being ready to meet any savagery leveled against them with equal and greater savagery. I got no sense that they were anything less than truly honorable soldiers and would behave as such but it did make me wonder if once the awful Genie of vendetta is out of the bottle can it ever be contained again or will the savagery simply escalate for both sides.
A mother’s love….for combat.
I had one of my rare opportunities to speak with a female soldier’s view on the war on terror. It’s not rare that I have female GI’s in my cab only that I am more hesitant to initiate conversation with them and they tend to volunteer less.
This woman, I learned, was a solider as was her husband who was currently deployed in Afghanistan. She had a very strong belief in the mission there perhaps more so because her hubby was there and was not a fan of the media coverage of the war or people who were against it.
Contrary to my usual “acting” performances where I take the same views as my unwitting interviewee so they’re more comfortable with me, I’ve been presenting the anti-war stance occasionally as tactfully as I can without pissing off a paying customer. She said she thought a lot of the people who were anti-war were also very anti-soldier and she referenced the massacre in Hadditha repeating the old mantra of “but no one reports on the good stuff we do there.”, I tried to assure her that the movement was definitely “hate the war, support the warrior” in its philosophy for the most part and we merely didn’t want anyone to die for the folly of politicians. She said we don’t see how people in other countries live and we really took our freedoms for granted here and that people like her were the ones defending them. Sound familiar?
In this woman’s defense I didn’t really get a sense on how she felt about Iraq and so I’m basing my reporting of her views solely on Afghanistan. I personally am still just slightly on the fence about Afghanistan. If, and this is becoming a pretty big if, the people responsible for 9/11 were trained and funded by the Taliban then they probably did need “vanquishing” and Afghanistan “liberated” from them, although 4 years later that was obviously another “mission unaccomplished” by our sad excuse for a leader. That being said I can understand a person clinging to the hope that we started out doing something good there more than I can fathom anyone thinking Iraq was a “good thing.”
Now I know some of you would be disappointed if there wasn’t a truly heartbreaking element to some of these stories so here it is. She told me that when her husband came back or soon before, I wasn’t clear on that, that she either had the option to deploy to a war zone or not, at least for a while she could choose to stay home. The reason was, she had a nine month old baby and the army was going to give the family a pass at least until the child was a certain age I think. She was torn on whether to go or not. She stated quite matter of factly that she was trained as a soldier and she wanted to see combat. She said she was about 50/50 on the idea. She asked my opinion and of course I told her I thought her family, the world, our country etc etc. would be better served by her being a mother to her child for a while. I added, somewhat sarcastically but not really, that I doubted they would run out of wars anytime soon for her to go to.
Needless to say my depression meter went into the red this evening. How could a woman even have a doubt about whether she should stay to raise her child before the army inevitably rips her away from it someday as they already did its father when the child was only 3 months? Is our military training that good? The need to exercise lethal skills taught to you that overpowering? I thought the old adage was that one trained to fight so that one would never have to, that we prepared for war to ensure peace, not to desire war. I admit this was the first female soldier that I truly got that gung-ho sense from and it was indeed a bit unnerving. More unnerving was that the decision seemed to be less based on her child as her husband. He hadn’t even lived yet where she was deployed so she was concerned about him coming to live in a new and strange house and her leaving him with the baby. I can only hope the maternal, not the killer instinct wins out in this young woman’s soul. Always tip your cabbie.
Shadow out.
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