Tomas Young, paralyzed by a bullet to the spine five days after being deployed to Iraq in 2004, passed away two days ago, on the eve of Veterans' Day, a few weeks shy of his 35th birthday. He was the author of the "Last Letter", an incredibly powerful, damning letter that he wrote to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the 10th Anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. If you missed that letter when it was published last March, you could pay no better respects than to read it now, in its entirety.
Here are two excerpts from his letter:
...I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
...My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
There is also an
interview with Chris Hedges from last March.