My heart goes out to al those maimed, and regret that our progress is linked to their suffering.
There’s always a Plan C—West Point teaches you that. If the road is mined, the bridge in splinters, and your opponent’s brigade massing on your left, you find a new road, build a new bridge. That’s Army DNA, the building blocks of a successful warrior, and it has been flush through Capt. Dawn Halfaker’s cells since her first weeks at the elite military college and as a guard on its women’s basketball team. Keep moving. There’s always another way.
Then you graduate and, because you’re an action junkie thrilled by weapons and foreign cultures, you’re assigned to run a military police station outside Baghdad. One morning before sunrise in June 2004, you’re bumping along in a Humvee on a routine patrol when someone aims a rocket-propelled grenade your way. It’s a lucky shot. The bomb tunnels into the carriage, shears off your buddy’s arm, and blasts through your own, making spaghetti out of tendons and muscle. What the insurgents don’t get, the surgeons finish off, leaving you with nothing below your shattered right scapula but expectations.
You’re 24, a child of the computer age. When you wake up and learn there is no more right arm to write and eat and shoot jumpers with, you just know that the country that invented supercomputing and reconstructive surgery can give you something gleaming and spectacular. An arm to rival Will Smith’s appendage in I, Robot.
I feel more for people who are maimed / killed / injured in the workforce than I do for our volunteer army. It sounds cold I guess, but when you work to kill, you can expect bad things to happen…
And don’t get me started on sending homegrown citizens to fight in foreign wars for foreign interests…
“our progress is linked to their suffering”
No, the RPG is linked to their suffering, dumb-dumb.
Dumb-dumb? My, what whitty invecitve! What are you, a child?
Yes, our progress is related to their suffering. We need better prosthetics for them, and therefore spend money and effort to create said better prosthetics, which then benefit others whose limbs weren’t shot off.
I pay tribute to the character of our soldiers, to thier willing to make great sacrificies to their sense of what is right, just, and true, with course of life correspondent thereto. to their strict conformity to the duty imposed by conscience, position, or privilege. In other words, they live honorable lives.
What I don’t “get” about their commander in chief, is that when duty called, his sense of honor was not their. He conived his connections to get into a safe weekend warrior positon. I think we ought to pass a constitutional amendment that requires presidential candidates to have served a couple of years of active duty where they can learn the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent.
Jim
We have some fantastic kids out there. Everyone is a hero. Stop. No spin. End of story.