On Mar 30, 2008, at 10:02 AM, Nick Arnett wrote: > On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Dave Land <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> >> So what was he thinking? "Get the fuck out of Kentucky," >> Miller says, his lip curling in a half-smile. "It was the >> only way I knew to travel and see the world. I just >> happened to pick a weird time to go. I got to travel, and >> it was a life-altering experience, that's for sure." > > > And that's the reason Wes joined, too, he told me -- to travel and > see the > world. Fallujah was life-altering in the most dramatic of all ways > for him. > > Wes was killed the day after the picture of Miller was taken. > > The comments along the lines of "What did he think he was signing > up for?" > and "Others aren't using the war as an excuse" really get under my > skin. > Walk a mile in his shoes, people.
What do you mean for us to do with that challenge, exactly? I'm not demeaning Wes's sacrifice, or Blake's, or whatever sacrifices my old buddy Kurt may have had to make over the last 32 years, and I don't think the article is, either. The article, if anything, is a call for us to weigh the sacrifices that guys like Blake have made, to look his shattered life in the face and see that this war has not been "Mission Accomplished" and it is not all coming up roses and -- at least for guys like Blake Miller -- it is not going to be over for a long, long time, even if we "BRING THEM HOME" today, as the stickers on the trunks of both your car and mine demand. I'm sorry, but your challenge sounds like one of those straw men that you decry so thoroughly when others post them to the list. No matter how empathic I think myself, I cannot really know what it is to be a 17-year-old Kentuckian who wants more than anything else to get the fuck out of Jonancy. I can try to remember -- to the extent that I trust my ability to remember how I felt 33 years ago -- what it was like to wonder how the hell I was ever going to be anything other than a gawky kid in a backwater neighborhood of a declining steel town. I can think of my friend Kurt, who even then -- even in 1976, when there was no such thing in the American imagination as an "Iraq" -- was constantly asked "why the hell do you want to join the military when you can be anything you want?" It's even more difficult for me to know what it was to be Wes Canning, growing up in a suburb of Houston. Frankly, I don't know that you can, either, however much closer you are to his family. And even if you could, or I could, I don't know that "walking a mile in his shoes" would make me think any differently about the question, "what the hell were they thinking." I would still return to my own skin, my own life, my own consequences of my own choices, and wonder. We each make or choices and they have their consequences. As a father, I wonder about the consequences that will result from the choices that my own son will make. As Blake Miller suggests, it may be necessary to beat his ass with a shovel all the way through them fuckin' cornfields to bring a taste of those future consequences to his present state of mind. What loving father wouldn't? Sometimes, or choices may bring us wives and children and a little house in East San Jose and a job that can be interesting and challenging and a little frustrating at times. Sometimes, choices bring people like Blake Miller face to face with the utter insanity of war and death. The reckless, death-defying kid from the Kentucky hollow comes back a shattered, frightened shell of who he was. And, as you well know, sometimes, the consequences of those choices mean that someone's kid never comes home again at all. Dave _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
