Wish I Knew

This post, if it ever sees the light of day, is a fairly severe departure from my regular type. Its not a rant, or a complaint, or a call to action or arms. I'm not sure what it is. I sat down with no idea what, if anything, was going to make the trip from my head through my fingers and onto the screen. Normally I have some notion or topic that I want to cover or explore and I go with it. I actually believe, in my twisted mind, that I'm writing something that someone would actually like to read. I just don't know if that's the case here. This is not a rant. I suppose if truth be told its more of a whine. I've been reduced to whining because I just don't know what else to do. I have never, ever, in my life felt so powerless to influence or affect events that have such an impact on my life and the lives of my loved ones. I'm whining because I'm scared shitless that I'm going to get the call telling me my son has been killed in a foreign land by enemies of our country, savages who want nothing else in this world than the deaths of as many American soldiers as they can possibly cause. Animals who kill other humans as casually as we would tread on a spider and who have become so skilled with ways and methods so barbaric and horrific that details and accounts of their deeds are not believed by the rest of us. I can't do anything to stop it. I can't do anything to help him and I can't do anything to influence the people who are running this war and this country to make him or any of them with him any safer. I am not unique. I am no one special. Across this country thousands and thousands of other families deal with this every day and every night and I'm thinking most of them don't whine about it. They suck it up, accept it for what it is and hope for the best. Far too many of them have already had to deal with the nightmare. Right now 9 American families are finalizing funeral arrangements. No spoken or written word can do anything to help those people. I feel ashamed, knowing what these families are going through right now, to say one word about how hard this is for me to deal with. I feel ashamed, knowing what my son's wife goes through every day, to complain. I feel ashamed when I see my four grand children coping with every day life with no Daddy around. Let me tell you folks, it sucks and I only hope that my whining does not diminish his service. Something tells me that even though its wrong to feel this and even worse to express it, if I don't I'm going to explode. Maybe someone will read this, maybe not. Maybe just getting it out of my head and into black and white in front of me will be enough for me to move past it, suck it up and put my "game face" back on. I just don't friggin' know. All I know is I've never seen any other parents of a deployed soldier write anything like this. But I have to wonder if any of them feel or felt the same way.

Many, if not most of you know that my son, Billy, is currently serving a deployment with his Army Engineer Batallion in Afghanistan. He's been there since the first week of this past May and his deployment is scheduled to last until May 2010. We are hoping he will be able to come home for a "R&R" leave right around Christmas time. That's not guaranteed but we're hoping it will come about. Afghanistan is big news right now. I posted a rant a couple of weeks back imploring President Obama to follow the advice of his chosen Army generals to expand the war effort so as to be able to accomplish the mission as he, Obama, laid it out both during his campaign and upon being elected. Since the news broke of the Army's assessment of the situation the entire Afghanistan campaign has become the most hotly contested political argument surpassing even the debate over the health care reform efforts. This week on the CBS Evening News Katie Couric devoted three entire 1/2 hour news casts to the situation in Afghanistan and the debate currently underway in Washington regarding the course to be taken. Its obvious that there are no easy or simple solutions but once again, in true D.C. fashion the whole deal is being boiled down to the same old bullshit Democrat vs. Republican, Us vs. Them, Blue State vs. Red State, Liberal vs. Conservative and any number of other A vs. B scenarios and while all the arguing and posturing and statements and counter statements are going on one thing is constant: American kids are sweating and suffering and dying and, in the immortal words (at least here in the Philadelphia area) of one Ricky Watters, I have to wonder, "for who - for what?"

Ricky made a half hearted attempt to snag a football thrown his way and when chided for the blatantly obvious failure to give the expected "110%" that athletes are supposed to exert in their efforts to entertain us with their blood sport, Ricky responded with the above quote. To Ricky, doing so would have most likely resulted in his taking a pretty severe hit from the defending players, and, in Ricky's estimation, expending the effort required to make the catch would not have resulted in a substantial gain of territory on the field and so we were treated to, "for who - for what?" Ricky didn't care. Pro athletes get paid the same win, lose or draw.

Lately I've been kind of thinking along Ricky's lines when it comes to the goings on in Afghanistan. It just doesn't seem to me like anyone in Washington really wants to win the game. Obviously there's a whole hell of a lot more at stake here then who wins a stupid football game and don't think for one minute that I am trying to compare the war to a game. Its not. People can get hurt playing football but people die in war. The soldiers and marines over in "the Stan" don't think its a game either and they can't understand why the politicians who are running the country and the war think it is. Lately all we've been hearing about is Obama's "strategy" for moving forward, forming a "new strategy". What is wrong with his last strategy? What's changed since he formed the last strategy? I don't know. Do you? Does anyone? Last I heard there were people in Afghanistan who wanted to kill us. All of us. As many of us at one time as they could. Remember 9-11-01? I do. Us going in to Afghanistan was to find and eliminate the people who did that as well as all their friends and relatives who were lined up waiting for their chance to do the same. I suppose all we can do when faced with a situation we have not had to deal with previously is try and relate in some way to something we have dealt with. In my case I think back to a period of time in 1990 when I was assigned a foot beat in one of the most notoriously violent public housing projects in Philadelphia. I walked, with one other officer in and around 3 high rise apartment buildings. At any given time we were outnumbered probably 2000 to 1. Groups of loiterers gathered outside the building entrances in groups as large as 40 to 50 individuals and most of them either had guns on their persons or had them stashed close by and readily available. Our only hope of gaining any measure of respect and maintaining any hope of survival was to convince the locals that we were, A - the two baddest, craziest psycho cops they had ever seen and that, B - ANY effort on their part to challenge our authority or do us harm would be met with swift, sure and deadly retribution. You don't want your police to act that way? Get over it. It goes on every single night of the week and if it didn't there'd be more cop funerals than you could believe. Were it up to me there would not have been only two of us there. There would have been two HUNDRED! And we would have cleaned out the bad guys, locked them up, beat them up or shot the sons of bitches who we couldn't lock up or beat up and make sure they all knew if the decent people who lived in the projects had to live in fear and never come out of their homes then we would be back and we'd do it all over again. Doesn't work that way I guess. Can't be violating the civil rights of criminals lest we have Jesse and Al raising hell. But Afghanistan is not the projects and the animals over there have no civil rights.

War sucks. For the life of me I don't know why we all just can't get along and war over religion....RELIGION....is the most stupid thing I've ever heard of. Stupid. The word doesn't cover it. Asinine. I have no thesaurus handy, but war over religion is as dumb as it gets but we've been doing it since they invented religion and I don't guess its going to change anytime soon. But no matter how stupid the reason, war is war, and if you're going to get into one then you damn sure better make certain you win. Over whelming force, applied mercilessly and swiftly. Eliminate the enemy once and for all. If you're going to send our kids over there and ask them to accept the risk of getting killed they MUST know that their country and their leaders are giving them every thing they need to do the job, do it right, do it with extreme prejudice and then get them the hell out. Maybe if Leisure Suit Larry in Iran sees what happens to the Taliban and bin Laden's buddies he wouldn't be so quick to rattle his saber and that would be one less place we'd have to worry about sending our kids off to next.

So here I sit, in front of a computer, warm and safe in my home, and perfectly able to go to sleep (most likely with the assistance of some pretty gnarly drugs) and rest knowing that there is no one on top of the hill surrounding my house who is devoting every moment of his existence trying to figure out how to kill me. Is my way the answer to the problem? Hell no. I know that. I wish it weren't so but I know. But there's a lot of ground between my way and the way we've been doing things so far and maybe if we moved the operations a little closer to my way, and let the bad people know that we're there to stay and make life miserable for those who oppose us both my son and I could sleep a little better tonight. And I wouldn't feel like I was letting him down by being so worried. Thanks for hanging in and reading this far. 'Preciate it.