Daily Kos

About Aunt Lil: She's been carried her share of burdens in this life, single-handedly raising the kids she insisted on adopting in spite of her husband's objections--and helping raise the rest of us as our parents had hard times when we were small. She never complained about staying married to that jerk of a man, who she had to marry because my grandfather died when she was 17 and someone had to support her, until her kids had left home. She lived gracefully through losing her closeness to her son when he learned that she's gay, and fighting to stay connected to him after he came home from the Gulf War silent and furious.

Her investment in her son, and her persistence in being present for him and his young wife when their first child was born early and sick five years ago, has made me esteem her character all the more. When she told me that his IRR would force him to deploy and stay in uniform indefinitely under stop-loss, I assumed she must have misunderstood. So I called him and asked for details, which I assumed I must have misunderstood. This man had been out of uniform for 8 years and 11 months and was within three weeks of being due for a DD-214. I figured there was some mistake, and as the most educated person in my family I felt obligated to dig into the rules and find out what had gone wrong.

I was wrong when I instinctively told Aunt Lil, `Don't worry, I'm sure they can't do that'. Because it only took me a few hours of research to confirm that they can do that. I was particularly outraged to learn that they plan to continue doing it to families, and to oursoldiers who agreed to defend us in wartime conditions, until we do whatever it takes to end the march of our armies in a war on a noun.

I don't talk about the fear associated with having a relative in the forgotten hot zone, because I feel crazy. Every time I leave the house there are those `support our troops' ribbons in front of me. They have become ubiquitous, but if I mention to anyone that we're at war in Afghanistan, I get `Huh?' It seems like only those of us who are waiting for our loved ones to get out of that hellhole, where they are asked to make the ultimate sacrifice while America watches the Michael Jackson trial, still know that our troops are there.

They are still there, and today another dozen or two died. I hope my cousin isn't one of them, in part because I don't know whether my aunt will make it if the Navy has to send the officers to her door. That woman in Tucson who died after she learned of her son's death? I can imagine my aunt going that same way, in spite of her physical health, because it would break her heart.

I also want him to come home for my own selfish purposes; while we haven't always been close, he's been a pillar since I adopted a child of color in spite of my worried white privilege. He's been a reassuring rock, confident that we can raise her well as long as we notice what we don't know, and ask for help. If he doesn't come home, I'll find someone else to ask...but I was counting on him to show my daughter that her life is destined to be successful and happy. As his life has been.

And I'm not ready for it to end, for my kid, for his kids, for his wife and mother. We need our soldiers back. Sixteen families got the nightmare knocking at their doors this afternoon, and I'm smaller for hoping that mine wasn't one of them. Every time I see a headline like this, I ask myself, What am I doing today to end this war?