This week's GonzoFest has stolen thunder from one especially sparkly trace of Excellent News. For the first time, I found myself writing a thank you note to my other senator, John Warner, he of the steely white hair, craggy jawline and flat-out loyalty to All Things War.
I suspect few of us at DailyKos were aggressive partisans before the Republicans of the Bush Administration made partisanship the measure of patriotism. John Warner pleasantly surprised me -- no, that's not true: he shocked me out of my shoes -- by calling for Bush to return 5,000 troops stateside by Christmas.
In keeping with my mother's insistence upon saying, "please," and "thank you," where merited, I sent this (moderately revised) email to Sen. Warner:
Dear Sen. John Warner,
I am not sure what led you to shift your position a little on our soldiers in Iraq, but I am overjoyed to see you make any move toward bringing them back to America.
My neighbor spent about two years in the blistering sand -- he's National Guard. He dropped by my home this week with two abandoned puppies that showed up on his doorstep. We live on a country road without painted lines; people tend to toss out spare puppies and cats here, figuring someone will take them in. We've already accumulated two barn cats; they earn their keep as mousers. I have enough overfed, sofa-sprawling, love-hog house cattle right now; I turned down the handsome young hounds.
Before he loaded the pups on his ATV for the trip back to his house, I told my neighbor how glad I am that he made it home to Virginia with all his pieces and parts.
"At least all the ones you can see," he said.
I nodded. We knew better than to say more because his little girl was near. We managed to discuss his war service silently, with a lingering eye-to-eye honesty.
His daughter was laughing breathlessly, romping in my back yard with the frolicking puppies. I think she's about five years old. I watched her dash figure eights around my clothesline, alternately chasing and running from the two black puppies. Her white-blonde hair was nearly iridescent in the coming dusk.
Her daddy kept a close eye on her, although she never went more than 25 feet from him. He was polite to me, completely a gentleman, but his eyes continued to skip from my face to his daughter, alert, watchful. To anyone who might have come up the driveway at that moment, we three would appear to be experiencing nothing but an early summer evening in America, a priceless treasure.
We were quiet, yet the neighbor and I both had war screaming in our heads.
Senator Warner, if your actions bring one father or mother home to their children, you have improved the world -- especially for the members of our National Guard, who never should have been offshore at all, much less for two years at a pop. These are cops and factory workers, much like our local small-town, rural volunteer fire and rescue squad members. They are people who agreed to serve -- not as active soldiers on the other side of the world, but to help citizens here at home.
I can barely imagine the desperation the National Guard families experience while watching their beloveds deploy to the Middle East, rather than to a domestic situation where other Americans need help recovering from a wildfire, flood, earthquake, or hurricane.
National Guard members showed up to help my family escape our flash-flooded home when the river broke its banks during a hurricane in the late 1980s. Today, who would come? An essential part of our national defense system is scattered, decimated, abused, wasted, and all for -- what? What have we gained from invading Iraq? Nothing, sir. Nothing.
And just so you know: my grandfather served in Germany and very quietly came home with solid white hair in his early 20s; my uncle volunteered for Vietnam as a U.S. Marine and came home with two purple heart medals and a permanent limp; my young cousin also volunteered as USMC; he's now in his early 20s. My family has served and served, in war after war.
The entire Iraq mess may be something we can never really correct.
Anything we may have gained in Iraq will never approach the price we have paid for it, and what we will continue to pay in war machinery costs, lost lives, decades of human misery in the forms of brain damage, lost limbs, horrific burns, nightmares -- all the small, heart-breaking instances of useless, crushing sacrifice.
I didn't write to preach at you; I sincerely thank you for absolutely anything you can do to get America's citizens out of this horror.
Your actions may be nothing more than political games, but I'll take it any way I can get it: bring home 5,000. Bring home 160,000.