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• Tuesday, May 29, 2007 02:49 PM

  Honor Be Damned.

  Verelse,

  I would like to point out that no soldier wants to come home without honor, but the soldiers who do not at least attempt to come to grips with the logic behind their mission, who seem the most angry when they attack people who oppose the war, are doing their part to keep this miserable mission going.

  There is no way to turn a dishonorable war into an honorable one, painful as that is to hear. It's not the soldiers' fault! I think, unlike after Vietnam, the average citizen fully understands the difference between a private or corporal or non-com or an officer, and an elected policymaker. I highly doubt there will be anger or violence directed against those who served.

  I believe there should be a great deal of anger towards those who sent them overseas to die for the most cynical and political reasons. Unlike Vietnam, where there was at least the pretense of a strategic rationale behind the war (the Domino Theory, etc), Iraq never made sense.

  It's been a combination of war profiteering, greed for oil money (pretty disappointing on that front), DoD contracts, and political idiocy, engineered to take advantage of wounded American pride and a deepseated desire to DO SOMETHING, anything, to someone somewhere, post-9/11.

  Verelse, I certainly hope for your son's safe return. And then...after the dust has settled, and maybe once he has some distance from it all, I hope he can understand how the civilian leadership of this nation has betrayed him and his comrades-in-arms. And I hope he becomes part of a solution to the bigger-picture quandary that is American politics.

  —SalilM Read SalilM's other letters
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