Our very own commenter Jules, at Sirens:
Looking back on the time between his leave and the time he was done with his tour seems so short. But it went agonizingly slow. My partner and I both had trouble sleeping. Our sleep was plagued with nightmares. As things got worse in Iraq, we dreaded coming home, afraid to find a car in the drive. We both knew what that meant.
Throughout his deployment the people around us would tell us how proud we must be. The hardest ones to take were the ones who started spouting the “fight them over there” crap. They have no idea of the sleepless nights and the struggles to maintain composure when we talked to our son, no idea just how bad things are in Iraq. Nothing would make me angrier than listening to the President give a speech. All I could think about were his daughters running around drinking and doing nothing. They are about the same age as my son. They do nothing while he is risking everything for their father’s vanity war. I have no time for supporters of this war, especially those who are content to allow others to fight it while they wave their flags.
A.
those kind of people would never get it.
He is my best friend:
Its not being able to sleep, or breathe, or eat. Hearing about the near misses or how his friend was blown up in front of him so that pieces of him landed on him.
To hear about his constant fight to stay professional, to keep his men acting professional and not let his men slip down into the hate mentality. The fight to keep thinking of the Iraqi people, as people with souls, as each Iraqi as a man, a woman, a child, and not something evil that’s trying to kill him.
I hate it, totally and completely hate it, to hear people shouting off about his mission, when it was his aunt who raised him! When it IS his aunt who is aging before my eyes, his aunt who prays night and day for her heart to come home. His aunt who Prays that he will still be the man she knew before he went to war when he gets home. Not the family members who only talk about how proud they are of him because his Operational Area was the busiest and he saw the most combat. How we got to win this War On Terror! He is my best friend so I bite my tongue and don’t scream at them about the Bush lies.
I just make sure I spend every second of every day he is away close to an open phone line so that he can call me. So that for the few hours every few weeks he has a chance to call me, I put my life on hold so I can talk to him.
When he calls I want to hear every word—I stop breathing, I hold my breath—afraid that the noise will drown out some important nuance to his stories of firefights and death. Tell me how can a story of broken Marines have a nuance? How in the Hell can a story of death mean anything except someone’s family, some mother or father, or sister, or best friend has lost the most important person in their life?
Tell me just who is the evil terrorist in this story? The mass murderer who ran up an impressive body count over the space of 20 years? Or the man who lied us into a war because his friends wanted the oil?
OK this is a rant.
Oh, ivy.
Take good care.
A.
thank god georgie is the deciderer.
GRRRRR.