Morale Collapsing for Many Military Families

By Jeff Davis
August 6th, 2006

A Zogby poll taken in February reports that 72 percent of US troops in Iraq think the occupation should end in 2006. 51 percent of US troops in that poll think the occupation should end in six months or less. These soldiers are on the ground in Iraq and they are seeing first hand how the occupation is going. They aren’t in some air-conditioned think tank in suburban America with Israeli flags on the wall, cheering on Rumsfeld and Cheney.

Our volunteer military joined to defend the United States, not the interests of Israel and Halliburton. There are some truly soulless people in America today, who don’t care one bit about these soldiers. Many of these people parrot the words “Well, those soldiers deserve to keep getting sent to Iraq, they volunteered, didn’t they?” (By the way, every time a neocon says those words, a devil gets his horns.) Most of these amoral Americans never served in the military. They are confusing the US military with a pack of mercenaries. Mercenaries should expect to be sent to fight for private corporations for evil purposes and deserve whatever happens to them. American soldiers deserve better.

A new website has appeared in which one can read the letters from military families protesting Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to refuse the soldiers return to the United States at the end of their one year tour, and to keep them in the Iraqi quagmire for yet another year. Some of these soldiers of the 172nd Stryker Combat Brigade were actually in Kuwait waiting to board aircraft for the United States when they were ordered back into the oven-like summer hell of the guerilla-infested Baghdad streets.

Many of the comments on the website are from parents and loved ones back home, who feel devastated by the Pentagon announcement and -for obvious reasons- those soldiers who do choose to comment must remain anonymous.

One comment on that website noted “Our 172nd Stryker Brigade (is) being treated like garbage. Is this the thanks that our sons and daughters get after a long hard year of watching best of friends die and dragging their bodies off of the back of vehicles? Is this what they get after watching friends being blown up by suicide bombers and IEDs, and losing their limbs and other devastating injuries? They are tired, they have fought hard, gone without meals, lived in the desert in the sweltering heat. They are mentally and physically tired. and then they wait until most of them have one foot on the plane out of that place, and come and tell them that they can’t come home…why, a dog shouldn’t be treated this way!”

What these families haven’t yet started to come to grips with is that the war may be widening and nobody may be coming home any time soon –except in a body bag. There is much talk about a peace-keeping force being sent to Lebanon once the Israeli troops pull out. As we discovered in Iraq, the initial invasion doesn’t produce the most casualties, it’s the occupation.

The Israelis believe the US is stupid enough to blunder it’s way back into Lebanon, forgetting that truck-bombing incident where 241 Marines died all at once. Most Americans don’t remember a second truck bomb a few months later destroyed part of our embassy in Beirut killing another 63 Americans. Given the fact that the Israelis have lost a significant number of tanks in the first few weeks fighting Hezbollah, it’s impossible to think a US occupation would not run into truly hellish resistance –even worse than the worst part of Iraq.

 
Source: WhiteCivilRights.com
 
 

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