Letters to the Editor
Garry Owen
Published Letters: 2821 Editor's Choice: 151
-
Thank you Stephanie for a well written review and for a sensitivity rarely given
[Read the article: "Flags of Our Fathers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I probably won't see this film, so your review will have to do. I can't go to movies that strive to show graphic scenes of real combat with it's violence so sudden, so random, so incomprehensible to the civilians who will watch it. It may be good entertainment for them, but it's not good for me.
I know this much without seeing it, from your review, that I am grateful to Clint Eastwood for showing America what happens to veterans after they come home. America loves its heroes. Then it uses them. Then it replaces them with new ones.
I grew up with a World War II hero. My father. As the seasons of the year roll on each year I come to be with him again in January, in a place not many people have ever heard of, just outside Bastogne. His hell, his frozen 28 days of hell, transformed him and although I had not yet been born, it was so powerful it ended up shaping me too. When you live with a war veteran, if you are married to one, if you are the child of one, you will be affected by what happened to him. Somebody said it takes two generations for that life-altering experience to fade out.
The military recruiters will say that war makes a man or woman out of you. That's what sells to a 17 or 18 year old mind. It's not as simple as all that. A war will take things away from you and replace them with other things. All that can truthfully be said is that you will be changed, sometimes for the better, but more often for the worse.
There are very few war veterans in Congress, fewer still in the board rooms of America's corporations. But there are plenty of them in homeless shelters and plenty more who learn to suppress the intrusive thoughts. They pack it all away in a locked store room of their mind and just move on, determined that they will not become another pathetic casualty.
I'm grateful that people who make movies these days have finally buried the myth of John Wayne. The image of an old man stumbling down the stairs, having to wait for help to get up, doesn't give anybody those star spangled goosebumps of patriotic pride they go seeking in the war movie genre.
But maybe, hopefully, if this movie has any lasting lessions it will be that America has got to remember to treat better the people they once hoisted as heroes.
Today America is cranking out another generation of young people who will be staggering home from the Middle East, confused and abandoned, wounded in body and mind. How will you deal with them? If what you see and hear of them right now is any indication, America will give them some gratuitous feel-good sop, use them as props and then turn away to the next big thing, like they always do.
The recruiters won't tell you that. I hope this movie does.
-
If it were not so horrifying, it would be comic farce
[Read the article: "Ugly choices" in Iraq -- but after the election is over]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Our lunatic Supreme Leader, who thinks he is infallable because he was personally tasked by Jesus Christ to lead our country, continues to stubbornly lay waste to human life on the grand scale. Now Von Rumsfeld is directed by the hand of God.
You know what? We're living in the 12th Century.
How the hell did this happen?
-
is joe whining again?
[Read the article: "Ugly choices" in Iraq -- but after the election is over]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Seem like just yesterday he was accusing us "libruls" of whining. But if you really go back and look at most of his letters (if you have the stomach) aren't they all just a series of whining and lying?
Something provoked joe this morning. Something really got under his skin. It's good he tries to keep his spitwads to one or two sentences at a time because when he starts getting to paragraph length, he reveals himself to be just another Limbaugh dittohead.
You like it so much over there joe? Get your ass over there, like I and a half a million other vets went to Vietnam, you puking coward.
-
We're all waiting joe, when are you shipping out?
[Read the article: Lieberman gets poll Joe-mentum, Bush love]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Whine whine whine, that's all you do joe. It costs about the same for a coach class ticket to Baghdad as it does to fly from Chicago to Australia. GO!
No? Won't/can't? Don't wanna? Got better things to do?
-
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong
[Read the article: Lieberman gets poll Joe-mentum, Bush love]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But isn't it true that if you are elected to Congress as an independent, you are not assigned any meaningful committee seats by the House or Senate majority, be it Republican or Democrat? So even if Lieberman is elected as an independent, he will not sit on any substantive committees.
-
Jarhead just made Kerry's point for him
[Read the article: White House: Kerry insulted the troops. Kerry: No, I insulted Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jarhead, you're living proof that there were at least some not-so-bright guys Vietnam.
You got a lot of gall talking about the Winter Soldier "scam" when the whole Iraq War, BUSH'S war, was based on a pack of lies. I'll put my DD214 up against yours any time. I'm a Democrat. I'm a Liberal. I like guns. So what do you think of that?
What do you want, a medal or a chest to pin it on? That's MY flag you're wrapping yourself in, squid licker! So climb back on your bar stool at the American Legion and drink yourself stupid again. You've got no exclusive franchise on military bragging rights because there were plenty of Democrats "up country" in 'Nam and there are plenty of them serving right now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The military hasn't changed much since Vietnam. The rich kids get out of it (Starting with BUSHY) and the poorer kids and dumber kids get thrown right in the meat grinder.
You know that's a fact so get down off that high horse before you fall off.