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One of the blessings or curse of my broken heart from my son’s death last summer is I have developed a ‘sense of death’ that helps me understand the suffering and death of others.
Today’s newspaper listed four new U.S. military casualties in the war in Afghanistan. As I read the names memories flash back to a wonderful young man I knew that was killed in the early days of the war in Iraq.
I was sad to hear that in 2010 More Troops Lost To Suicide Than Combat In Iraq, Afghanistan For Second Consecutive Year. The great number of men and women returning from these two wars seriously injured in mind, body and soul is overwhelming. To think of all the people of Iraq and Afghanistan that have killed or injured is almost unbearable.
Today on the Oprah TV show I heard stories of families of soldiers killed or wounded and how we should do more for soldiers and their families. While I totally agree with doing more for our soldiers I do not agree with the reason why given on the show: they fought for our freedom. Soldiers and veterans should be honored, respected and treated in the best way we can, but, in my opinion, not because they fought for our freedom. Whatever the reason they entered the military, for education, money or patriotism they are not ‘killing or being killed’ in Iraq and Afghanistan for my freedom.
This dilemma of being against these unjust and immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan yet supporting our soldiers has been difficult for me. The best resolution I can come up with is my experience during the Vietnam War when fourteen of us in Milwaukee broke into the selective service officers and destroyed all the 1A records, those about to be drafted into the military. We did this act in 1968 as a real and symbolic act against the war in Vietnam and the selective service at the time that forced me to “kill or be killed” or to go to prison or exile.
One of the effects of the Milwaukee 14 that I had not seriously thought about was how many young men at the time would escape the selective service system and serving in the war because , in the time before computers, their records were destroyed. For many years after wards we receiv3ed thanks for men and their families for helping them invade military service. On the bottom of the Milwaukee 14 Today home page there is a thank you letter sent to Jim Forest, one of the Milwaukee 14, in 2007 from a woman whose husband escaped the military due to our action. She talks how she struggles with the present wars while her son-in-law is preparing to go on his fourth tour of duty in Iraq, missing the birth of his children and four of the five years of his marriage to her daughter.
My viewpoint article against military training at Marquette university appeared in the student newspaper today, the Marquette Tribune. ROTC on campuses and in our education system is the new selective service system to me.
Looking for my viewpoint in the Marquette Tribune the last week or so I noticed that a young man who had been in ROTC, fought in the war in Afghanistan and recently returned to finish his degree at Marquette and now was in graduate school at Northwestern, had committed suicide over the Christmas holidays. His father said had suffered signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
No man or woman should be sent to an “unjust, immoral and illegal” war by an government official or corporate elite, ‘powers that be’. For my friend who died in Iraq, this graduate of Marquette who died after serving in Afghanistan and thousands and thousands of wounded and killed resulting from the war I must say yes to the soldiers and No to the war and the new recruiting and selective system that sends persons to ‘kill or be killed.” Like 1968 what other choice do we have?
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