– I wrote what was, for me, a sad and poignant piece ➡ a few days ago about Viet-Nam, Iraq and the very transient reasons why so many of our young have lost their lives in these conflicts. If you need yet another reason to doubt how much those who run the government really value the lives the naive and patriotic risk for them, this article might be a wake-up call.
——————————————————–
Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More… ➡
– I’d like to say a bit more on this subject. Some you, my readers, may assume from what I’ve written that I am totally anti-war but this is not so. When the US was attacked by the Japanese and when Hitler was bent on conquoring the world, those were situations in which I would have had no hesitation in defending my country. It is these other so-called ‘wars’, these affairs of geo-political positioning, these messes that we get into incrementally that end up so tangled that no one can quite remember how we got into them that I oppose. I refuse, point blank, to give anyone else a say in how my life is ‘spent’. If you have a war, I will decide for myself if I think it is worth risking my life for.