Over 4,000 troops peocessing out

[Sourdough]

This week over 4,000 troops are processing to leave for Afganistan.  My wife is on the processing line, and talks to each one.  Somehow she remembers each face, and can place a name to that face.  Being prior military herself she feels she has a better understanding of what these guys need than the other civilian people in her office that have never been in the military.  She knows their confussion, and about their desperation to get things right and leave their families with the right paperwork to get things done in their absence.

Wednesday night she came home really stressed out, crying, they are just babies.  Our son corrected her saying, "No mom they are grown men".  She replied, "I know, but to me they are just babies, and I can see the fear in their eyes".  Then she just sat down and stared at our son.  I could see in her eyes she is scared herself.  How many of these will she be notified won't be coming back.  How many will end up in hospitals, maimed or crippled for life.  She remembers
Sargent Chamberlain, the first soldier to die in from Ft WW.  She remembers others that never came back as well.  Then she just sits and stares at our son.  Knowing he will be going to OCS next month.  This war is Hell on Moms too.       

[Conan The Librarian]

Afghanistan? A worthless war and it is a crime to send them there. Shame on the fools with so little regard for priority and life.

[Old Fart]

This war is Hell on Moms too.     

True true true.......and dads also.

[powderman]

Every day we see the c130s flying from Ft Knox past our house. Usually 2 or 3 at a time, then more 15 min later. Sometimes 3-5 flights a day, and thats only on our path. I ofen wonder how many soldiers will be coming back. The past 2 weeks have been pretty busy. POWDERMAN. 

[Pat/Rick]

Afghanistan? A worthless war and it is a crime to send them there. Shame on the fools with so little regard for priority and life.

So far, I am under the impression that the wars we are involved in are all worthless neoconjobs. We should be better than to allow ourselves to be shivvied into a war under the guise of u.n. mandates. We should have taken out the capitol cities of all islamic nations and stayed home. Concede the globalist chess game and let em get a new patsy.

Sad for the families that have to endure, the vets that will be bodily or mentally scarred.

[oldsoldja]

I have a lifelong friend whose been in the army forever. He has the undesirable job of going to families and telling them of their childrens or spouses demise. When he told me he had to do that now, the look on my face made him burst into sobs. We talked for awhile about it and he said the worst thing is dreaming about it now, over and over, of seeing those peoples faces and hearing the shrieks and cries.

The evil that men do.

[Mikey]

We do have a choice.  We can keep our young boys at home and have them guard the borders and the shores while we stick our heads in the sand and HOPE that no crazy, brainless, toothless, suicidal frickin' al quida or taliban is going to set off a suicide bomb in one of our preschools, or one of our malls or historical places of interest and kill as many Americans as they can, or take a entire school hostage and then wind up butchering our children like what happen in Chechnia, or we can hunt the sons of witches down and kill them and push them so far back into the stone age that they never evolve into a civilization and drop a nuk on them once in a while just to make sure. 

Sourdough - sorry about your wife's concerns and fears but your son is right - they are not children or babies, they are men who have taken up the cause and whether they fall in combat or return safely to their homes is a matter of provenance, and their own choice - there is no draft now as there was during the Vietnam war.  And speaking of all this posturing and psalm singing and wringing of the hands with the teary eyed mommas and all those poor boys takin' up guns in the name of someone else's freedoms and all the other 'worthless causes', where the hell were all these people when we came back from Vietnam??  There wasn't anybody at the major airports helping our wounded down the concourses to catch a connection, or to help them with their duffels, or buy them a lousy airport coffee and try to help shattered men go home when their own hometown didn't want the 'crazed vets back' - didn't ya know we were all pot crazed baby killers - didn't anyone ever see the cartoon comparing the US soldier in Vietnam charactered as a WWII Japanese soldier with a dead Chinese baby on his bayonet - well hell boys, that was us alright - never fought a battle against any armed combatants, just killed off innocent women and helpless babies.  I distincly recall that only those 'units' that fought as a integral unit and returned to their home base as a 'unit' were the ones welcomed home by the families at the bases - the rest of us just had to push our way through hostile crowds at airports or try and shoulder someone else's duffel so we could get through the anti-war crowd to a connection.  It sure as all hell doesn't take a lot of effort to keep somebody on crutches from missing his plane ya know.

Conan - a worthless war.  Screw off.  Any time we can kill the enemy, preferably in his own home, when he feels safe and secure, and prevent further terrorist atacks HERE, it ain't worthless.  Maybe you would feel better if the taliban or al quida snuck in a few briefcase size dirty bombs to take out one or two of our cities and then with a few hundred thousand dead it might be more worthwhile.  Boy - you lookin' out the wrong hole. 

[magooch]

Right on, right on, right on, Mikey, but like I've said time after time--let the Air Force, or the Navy handle it.  I've said all along that a few nukes here and there and the world would be a lot friendlier.  If we're going to do a war, we have the obligation to do it with the best and most efficient means at our disposal.  There are no innocent civilians in war.

[AtlLaw]

good Mikey.

[Casull]

Kudos Mikey.  Couldn't have said it better.

[SHOOTALL]

Afghanistan? A worthless war and it is a crime to send them there. Shame on the fools with so little regard for priority and life.

Of all the wars we are involved in now this seems the one that we should be in. This land was where the attack on us came from . It is where those that planned it lived and hid. Consider if we had nuked Tora Bora with a limited nuke we would have caught alot of negative talk from the rest of the world for a short while but there would be less chance of more attacks . And it would be over now .

[mechanic]

IMO the only war we really NEEDED to fight was WWII.  However once we got in the others, we should have done them right...

Let Atlaw run the next one.

Ben

[Conan The Librarian]

Well, this is intriguing. Can you tell me what the US objective is for being there-- the actual formally articulated objective today? It will be interesting to read what an advocate of the Afghan war has to say about it.

[jrnsuz]

At 1700 today my youngest son will be talking to a Marine recruiter. He's 18 years old and is volunteering to defend his country. He is not a baby, a misguided, naive child or an over-grown man-boy with violent tendencies or a need to compensate for physical short comings.

He is a young man who is looking to the future and figures "if not me, then who?"

I worry about him and am concerned for his safety, but I'm also very proud that I have raised a man. I'm having a hard time expressing what I'm thinking and feeling, but I know nobody needs to feel sorry for him.

[billy_56081]

Well said Mikey, a soldiers job is to kill people and destroy property, if we are going to send them to harms way let them do their job. Also killing them there is much less costly than killing them here. And to the fruit loop crowd, they are our enemy and if we don't kill them there they will attack us here. You know nothing you are wrong and I am right.

My 20 year old daughter will be leaving soon as her unit is being deployed to the middle east. She is my baby, but she is no baby.