NOTE: I had put this in a comment, but figured it could rate a diary for the record. Since I'm lazy, and diary only every now and then, I figured "what the hell"...
Before he was injured, Corporal Jason Poole had planned to become a teacher. He now hopes to volunteer at a school or perhaps work as a teacher's aide.
I just can't stand hearing about how this war isn't like Vietnam. Sure, there's less mud and bamboo, but there's lots of dead, and even worse, there's the people who don't die.
Thanks to modern technology, the death rate in Iraq is less than Vietnam. But it would be a whole different story if it weren't for this medical technology.
These are people who were young, vibrant, hopeful and looking forward to life when they signed up, and are now learning things like how to ride a bus and buy chewing gum.
Sure, they aren't coming home to spitting hippies (get a load of the comments after the posting in the last link -it's Freeperville, after all).
That's because they are being shipped back in the dead of night, under press blackout.
And they will need medical care for the rest of their lives.
Medical care that is being cut off by George "Support the Troops, you Terrorist" Bush, so that his rich buddies get to keep their tax cuts, and he gets to keep playing with his toy soldiers.
I am not old enough to be a Vietnam vet. My father was an injured WWII vet. He's planted in Arlington. Got the whole deal, full military honors, guns in the air. All that stuff. He was a real hero.
Problem is, we're not exactly sure why.
He was also a CIA NOC, so I firmly believe that Karl Rove committed premeditated high treason in a time of war and should be stood up against a wall, given an exploding cigarette, a blindfold laced with habanero pepper and his doo-dads used for target practice with a rusty-roofing-nail-filled blunderbuss.
But I'm not bitter or anything. I'd gadly sit down with him and watch him sip on a broken-glass-and-dioxin-laced beer any day. Don't label me unfriendly.
These kids are my daughter's friends. They are the kids of my friends. They are the kids that I used to cuss at when they knocked down my mailbox.
It's personal, and it is getting more and more personal for all of us, every day.
You see, unlike dead people, live people come back, and talk to us. They tell us the truth, about what a hell we've created there; about how the flowers and candy turned into bullets and IEDs.
These people are coming back into the communities from which they left. Unless the Bush Crime Family plans on setting up veteran's gulags, they will not be able to stop this from happening.
I'm told this was exactly what started the turnaround with Vietnam, except that took longer, because more of the vets came back under flags.
War sucks. Only little boys that never had to endure it would want it.