This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second. It’s maddening to think that more than a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears will lead to little more than a pat on the back and a hideously redundant speech from someone who did none of the bleeding, sweating or crying.
I must remind myself not to offer any "hideously redundant speeches" if I ever meet Alex. The poor guy must not be reading enough right-wing blogs or he would 'know' that the surge is "working", not "getting more hopeless and dismal by the second". Maybe he and Michael Yon could get together. Yon is a 'real expert', while Alex is apparently just one of those 'defeatists' with 'an agenda'. Yon could regale poor Alex with reports of 'the mission'. Because having a mission to do something automatically means that success is inevitable. The best possible outcome is the only likely outcome, at least to neocons.
Despite being in a meaningless situation, my life has never had this much meaning. I watch the backs of my friends and they do the same for me. I’ve killed to protect them, and they’ve killed to protect me. For friends and family, being deployed is like being pregnant or surviving a car wreck; everyone is nice to you all of a sudden. People I don’t even know send me kind words and packages from all over. They came out of the woodwork knowing my plight and shared with me heartfelt hope and luck. The fact that you’re reading this now, dear reader, is a testament to that. Would you have cared about what I thought, felt or did two years ago? This position I’m in, shared by less than one percent of the U.S. population, has given me the distinct privilege of sharing my experiences and ruminations of this war, observations undiluted by perpetually delirious officials like General Petreaus and mainstream media sirens. I have felt every extreme of the human condition, physically, morally and emotionally. I’ve never laughed so hard, cried so long or felt more ashamed of myself in all of my life. In a matter of weeks it’ll be over, and I’ll have just the memories of enduring 130 degree heat, and poker games lasting well into the night. I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on it side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.
"perpetually delirious officials like General Petraeus"? "mainstream media sirens"? Oh, dear. It sounds like Alex "doesn't want to win". Doesn't he know that the troops will lose faith if he talks like that? Oh, wait...he is "the troops". Maybe it's not "treason", then.
It certainly sounds like he knows something about combat, and it doesn't sound as if he's been sitting behind a desk in the Green Zone, so I guess this would make him "not credible" to neocons. Does any of Alex's narrative sound like he's fighting a war against Islam for the survival of Christianity? Any mention of bringing democracy and hope to Iraqis? No. It's pretty much that he got the short straw in Bush's ill-considered gamble to look like a hero. For the neocons, who adulate "the troops" for values that these soldiers simply do not have, Alex is simply another aberration who must be punished when he returns home. Republicans who turn him down for a job will mumble that they "honor his service" while wishing him "luck". And the crude charade continues by flag-wavers dripping with hypocrisy.
And that’s how we’ve been leading our lives for the past year and two months. Going from place to place and hoping we don’t die on the way there or the way back. With our GPS tracking satellites and laser guided warheads and scientifically developed helmets for ultra comfort, we’re getting beat to the punch every day by a dude crouching behind a wall with a battery and a spool of wire. We’ve been killing the innocent with the guilty because we don’t have the luxury to tell the difference when that bomb goes off and you don’t know which of your friends are dead or alive. In essence, we’ve come here to help each other survive. It worked in most cases and sadly, not in others.
"killing the innocent with the guilty"? Say it isn't so! We're the good guys. Everyone we kill is Al-Qaeda, and the proof is that they are dead. Alex must not be reading the talking points from the White House.
All in all, not a particularly upbeat assessment of the "dramatic success" in Diyala. Surely there must be a general whose job is on the line to give us a more "balanced" view of the situation.
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