I’m not worthy

Sometimes I have to remind myself that there is a war going on. It’s easy for me, a high-tech yuppie living in a beautiful place with a view of the mountains out my office window – and no close friends in the military – to just see the war as a series of duelling straw-man arguments between the right and the left. (It helps that I don’t watch TV, so I never see the images of combat.)

Not only are young men and women dying (and killing others) on my behalf, they’re forced to endure memories like this for the rest of their lives:

He won’t talk about the weeks that followed. He only mentions moments, like still frames from a film. The day his column barely survived an ambush, escaping through a broken door as bullets struck near their feet. The morning he woke up to discover that a cat had taken up residence in the open chest cavity of an Iraqi body nearby, consuming it from within.

Whether you oppose or support the war in Iraq, I’m sure none of us want to see this: “People don’t want to know the Marlboro Man has PTSD.”

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