CASUALTIES

 nd my thoughts Veterans day. I wrote this near the beginning of these last decades endless wars. The costs too many of us don't want to aknowledge. As long as we didn't have to see the dead and the maimed. And because what? We didn't want to be called unpatriotic. That we were cowards oir some other damned smear.

There’s an early MASH episode with a storyline about a friend of Hawkeye’s. The guy is a writer and he feels that the only way he can write about combat is to experience it first hand. He’s critically wounded and dies on the table in surgery. As Henry Blake tries to comfort Pierce he tells him about two rules he learned in command school.

 

Rule #1: Young men die in war.

 

Rule #2: Doctor’s can’t change rule #1.

 

I keep running into this really strange attitude about the casualties in the Iraq war. Somehow printing casualty updates, especially fatalities is un-American and supporting the anti war effort.

 

My God, that’s what war is about. Soldiers and civilians are going to die. Usually badly. If you can’t face that then you have no business supporting any kind of war. That they died in a justifiable or unavoidable cause is the only thing that makes these sacrifices remotely bearable. My personal opinion is that the war in Iraq doesn’t fit either definition. It is also my opinion that supporting the war while ignoring the cost in lives shattered or lost is one of the ultimate hypocrisies.

Well I've shot about all the ammuition I have right now. Back to Springfield, reasonably peaceful Springfield, tomorrow.