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Memorial Day 2007 -- A Rough One
by Dale Brown, 2007

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, Monday May 28, 2007

I received a poignant e-mail from my sister-in-law last week, with two pictures of soldiers in my brother Jim's unit receiving Purple Hearts from their commanding officer, Colonel Lehr, and the brigade sergeant major, Command Sergeant Major Truxell (even though the photos were sent out to many folks on my sister-in-law's e-mail list, I don't have their permission to publish the photos yet, so I won't).

My brother's unit has lost seven soldiers in the month of May alone, and Fort Lewis, Washington lost sixteen.

My brother replied with a picture above of the makeshift memorial to the fallen soldiers set up in brigade headquaters.

In my opinion, the e-mail from my sister-in-law to her family and friends went right up to, but didn't cross, the line between sending a Memorial Day remembrance and request for prayers, and speaking out against the war in Iraq. She included a lot of facts and figures about the number slain and wounded and compared the numbers to the population of her hometown, making the numbers very personal indeed.

She certainly has a right to her opinions and fears. I give her enormous credit for keeping her family together while my brother went off on yet another deployment--he's in the Middle East for the sixth time since their wedding, including two tours in Operation Iraqi Freedom. My brother has missed most of his daughter's upbringing. Even when he was stateside, his previous assignments meant a lot of field work, sometimes for weeks at a time. This time, because the kids are older, the farewells were especially rough.

But farewells are part of the life of a military family in a time of war. If you count the No-Fly Zone patrols and the frequent exercises and deployments to the Middle East in the post-Desert Storm 1990s, guarding against a defiant and still-dangerous Saddam Hussein--and I certainly do--America has been at war for EVERY SINGLE DAY of my youngest brother's married life.

As a young armor officer who moved to a mechanized infantry and scout unit, my brother has been called upon to maintain a presence in the Middle East for almost two decades. In my mind, the ONLY way he could provide that service is because he has a strong, dedicated, loving woman at home to hold together his family and home until he returned.

But my sister-in-law's e-mail bugged me. I know she is not a fan of President George W. Bush--far, far from it--but wisely she has always kept her political views private. Her e-mail was tinged with a lot of bitterness, fear, and frustration expressed so openly, which was totally unlike her. She said the message wasn't political, and I don't think she meant it to be at all, but it rankled me.

Was she saying "enough is enough?" Was she saying, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said, that the war is lost and it was time to bring the troops home? It certainly seemed that way to me, and it made me more than a little concerned and uneasy. When a strong woman like my sister-in-law throws in the towel and wants to surrender, something serious is going on.

I thought about writing to her and telling her my thoughts about her e-mail and the photos and asking her what's really on her mind, and decided not to stir the shit like that on this Memorial Day weekend. I thought about writing to my brother only instead, but decided against that too--I'd expect him to stick up for his wife, as I would do, and he's going through enough tough times and receiving enough tough e-mails without having to deal with mine.

But I have a Web site and a blog, and I have something on my mind, so here goes:

I would be angry, frustrated, fearful, and bitter too--if the deaths and injuries happened at home, or at a normal workplace, or someplace or doing something else that's not supposed to be dangerous. But these are soldiers on a battlefield. They are fighting men and women. Their job is to live and train for the day that they are called upon by their Commander-in-Chief to leave their homes and go out and fight.

They were deployed to a very dangerous part of the world, a region infested with fundamentalists who kill and are willing to be killed in the name of God, and by insurgents and terrorists who want to kill Americans because we support Israel or just because we're over in their part of the world. The killers are supported by governments whose only goal is to hold onto power so they can make themselves wealthier off the oil they sell to the rest of the world, governments that will gladly turn their backs or even betray their friend and protector the United States of America so they can make themselves appear more sympathetic to the fundamentalists and jihadists. America is surrounded by enemies.

Is it a "war," a REAL war being fought by a committed and determined nation who know that the price of failure will be far worse than the pain of the loss of loved ones? No, it's not, and that is a tragedy. But does it matter? Again, no. The soldiers know they must go because they're ordered to go. They swore to do so. They accepted the money and the life and the benefits knowing that they could get the call at any time, and yet they stayed, and trained, and made ready.

I'm sure our presence in the Middle East has turned many against us who otherwise wouldn't have taken up arms against the United States of America, but that doesn't matter either. America was attacked, and we responded. We can second-guess the President all we want until the end of our days and the end of our children's children's days, but the fact remains that the President reacted to the threat, did his Constitutional duty, and sent our forces off to war.

Thank God all our soldiers are volunteers. The deaths of conscripts would be more difficult for me, especially fighting in an undeclared war where the threat to their home and way of life (although clearly present) is harder to see and therefore harder to justify the sacrifice. Thank God ignorant calls for conscription by racist nutcases like Rev. Al Sharpton and U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel have mostly been shunned.

My brother volunteered. The seven who died in his brigade this month, and the sixteen who died from Fort Lewis, and the 100 who died in all of the U.S. armed forces, all volunteered. Their deaths are tragic and horrible, but they died in service to their country in a life and vocation they chose for themselves.

I am not there to hold and comfort my niece and nephew when they see some horrible bombing in Iraq on TV or attend another funeral of a slain soldier, perhaps the father of one of their close friends. I can't offer them any more comfort than my sister-in-law already provides every day...

...except to say this: your father, my brother, is doing exactly what he wants to do--serve as an officer and leader in the United States Army. He is doing a good job in terrible conditions, upholding the pride and honor of himself, his family, his unit, and his country.

The worst part of this for me is to think that my sister-in-law has come to believe, after almost two decades of sacrifice, that it's not worth it--that if her husband is killed in Iraq, his death would have been nothing more than a tragic waste. I hope to God that's not the case. If it is, I hope that someday, when the pain has passed, I have the opportunity to tell my niece and nephew how proud I am of their father and the duty he performed for the Army and his country...

...and I hope they will listen, and try to understand.

To the families of those whose loved ones made the ultimate sacrifice: Thank You for your service and your love.

To the families of those who serve now: Thank You as well. Keep the faith--not with your president or country or government, but with your family and your loved one who serves.

They can do it without you, but their pain with be enormously deeper.

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