Back from my free hamburger (worth every penny), I read this article, which seems more appropriate fodder than food, for Veterans' Day. We're so happy to send kids to war (the 47% anyway, which ironically, is the percent of the vote with which it looks like The Rominee will end up). And we're so unwilling to face what it does to them. Hand 'em a hamburger (I took it, damn me), slap on a magnetic ribbon, go about your business, like a patriot.
A DECORATED combat veteran, Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith Jr. seemed the perfect soldier. Until, that is, he visited his family in Delaware last Christmas and, as he later told the police, “clicked on.”Inexplicably one morning, while driving his bright red Hummer on a public street, he ran down a 65-year-old woman, Marsha Lee, as she walked her dog, according to police accounts. Then, as a witness watched, he got out and threw Ms. Lee, injured and screaming, into the back seat and drove off...
... “I know my child,” said Sergeant Smith’s father, Dwight Sr., a 49-year-old manager in the Philadelphia schools. “This isn’t my kid. He was a goofy kid. This isn’t the same man that I sent over.”
The father was sitting morosely in his dimly lit dining room, the curtains all drawn. In the corner of the room was the purple heart that Dwight Jr. earned in Afghanistan, and in the living room just beyond was his wedding photo and a military portrait. It’s impossible to reconcile that beaming young man in the photos with the one who murdered and raped Ms. Lee.People of the RWS™, Fox "news," and teabagger persuasion seem to dislike President Obama because (among other thoughtful things) he likes to end wars; and he appears to consider going to war a last, as opposed to a first, a preferred, resort. Oh, Mitt Romney, under the influence of his neocon advisers, would have shown those Persians a thing or two, he would. We can't afford to appear weak, we can't. Real men cut off other kid's hair; and they start wars. And realer men don't bother to think about what wars do to those that fight them. That would show weakness, too, it would.
