"Don't ever think of coming back..."

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

From one of a number of Iraqi blogs I've been following. This from a 28 year old journalism student from Baghdad now studying in the U.S.

http://twentyfourstepstoliberty.blogspot.com/

Just a few seconds later, the phone rang. It was my Mom.

“The message said ‘I will see you soon’ what did you mean?” she asked in panic.

“Nothing. I just meant time will past very fast and will see you when I finish school in two years,” I said.

“Ok. I thought you were coming home. Don’t,” she insisted. “Don’t ever think of coming back now. It is so bad here. don’t come back please.”

I calmed her down and told her I wasn’t going back before I finished school. Then my father took the phone to talk to me.

“Listen, if we are going to die, you should stay alive,” he told me in his serious, yet fatherly tone. “you always told me you want to carry the name of our family and continue what we started. You should stick to that. I want you to do that and that means you don’t come back now.”

I talked to him and told him that all what I am doing now and all the tough times I am going through was to do what I promised to do, and what the family encouraged me to do. And that I wasn’t going back soon. Unlike my mother, he knew I wasn’t being honest. He felt there was something going in my mind but he didn’t want to talk about it. He knew he would lose the argument!

[Hav]

1. .

Wow, how sad is this?

It's the same with Riverbend. They tell their stories and confront us with the tragic reality, a human touch, while for many, war is just something abstract, a word or an event without any faces.
This is what we do to innocent people.

[CrispyQ]

2. An article I read some time ago interviewed Iraqi's regarding their daily life,

& one man was quoted as saying, "I go to a funeral almost every night."

That is no way to live.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. Kicking for the hell of it.

[Delphinus]

4. K&R

So very sad. "If we are going to die, you should stay alive ... " :cry:

[bonito]

5. This is what we do to ourselves

When will it end, maybe when we are no more, but one.
I don't know how hard that is to understand.

[salin]

6. kick eom

[midnight]

7. Another reason to bring our soldiers home. This is no way to

extract oil. We need to find another source of energy. One that doesn't use people as objects.

[EFerrari]

8. . . .

:kick:

[Hissyspit]

9. What an amazing immoral pathetic fucking mess we have made.

Americans. Our mess.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

10. "Listen, if we are going to die, you should stay alive."

I ask you, what parent cannot relate to that? What we need are these parents speaking to all of America about their families, what they fear and what they've lost.

This is the stuff that cuts through the political BS like a hot knife through butter.

[formercia]

11. When you kill their sons and daughters

you kill the whole family. Genocide by another means.