The casualties of war
Two days ago, I posted Eric Massa’s speech on the floor of congress. In that speech, he talks about the number of dead soldiers, killed in battle, thus far, in Afghanistan. He mentions that we don’t even know how many of our returning soldiers are committing suicide as a result of PTSD. I found this article about Noah Pierce and felt compelled to share.
Noah Pierce’s headstone gives his date of death as July 26, 2007, though his family feels certain he died the night before, when, at age 23, he took a handgun and shot himself in the head. No one is sure what pushed him to it. He said in his suicide note it was impotence—one possible side effect of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It was “the snowflake that toppled the iceberg,” he wrote. But it could have been the memory of the Iraqi child he crushed under his Bradley. It could have been the unarmed man he shot point-blank in the forehead during a house-to-house raid, or the friend he tried madly to gather into a plastic bag after he had been blown to bits by a roadside bomb, or it could have been the doctor he killed at a checkpoint.
We are so far removed from what is happening in the middle east. It’s like we’re watching some weekly series on TV. It could almost not even be real for those of us who have not served or have not had a close family member serving.
What are we doing, people? We have local war protesters who continue to draw attention to the Middle East (although, the recent police response to the recent SDS protest may have even slowed that momentum). But most of us are too busy in our own little world of , “My taxes are too high!” (to be read in a whiny voice-I think we need a font for that) “Gas is too expensive”, “I don’t have time to get my hair done”, to spend any energy on seeing this war drawn to a close and holding our president to his campaign promises-by when were we going to be bringing our troops home?
“I have spent many late nights drawing upon my experience from 24 years in the United States Navy and have reached the inevitable conclusion that our presence in Afghanistan, which has cost the lives of 912 American troops, and wounded 4,198 - not counting the thousands of internal wounds that we will see for years to come - must come to conclusion. After watching 1/3 of Hamid Karzai’s ballots thrown out due to voting fraud, it became as plain as day that we cannot force a Jeffersonian Democracy upon the people of this nation. It is time for us to refocus our efforts and bring this war in Afghanistan to a swift conclusion.
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