I’ve seen you around. I’ve seen you driving your gas guzzling SUV with
the “Support Our Troops” ribbon on the back. I’ve seen you wearing your
pro-war/pro-bush t-shirts as you walk right past me in my Iraq Veterans
Against the War t-shirt as if I don’t exist. And I’ve seen you at
anti-war rallies and meetings where I often speak, as you wave your
American flag and call me a traitor. In this country we have freedom of
speech. But you owe me and every other veteran of this war the respect
of listening to our experience.
Your magnet says “support our troops,” but what have you done for us?
Not a penny of the proceeds go to us, instead they go to sweatshops in
China. You say that I am not supporting the troops when I say that they
should come home. But I am, because I know that there was no threat to
our nation from Saddam Hussein, I know that Iraq had no weapons of mass
destruction, and I know that we were not welcomed in Iraq as
liberators. I know that the Iraq war was not worth fighting. I know,
because I fought there. You say I’m confused. But what do you know
about Iraq? You’ve never been there.
You have the audacity to claim that by not supporting the president, I
don’t support the troops. Yet, the president chose to send over 160,000
of us to Iraq unprepared and without a defined mission. We had no body
armor, no vehicle armor, and poor supplies of ammunition. Our families
spent thousands of dollars that they did not have to supply us, while
President Bush did nothing. In fact he didn’t even scold his Offensive
Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, when he told our forward deployed troops,
“you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.”
Moreover, the mission was originally about weapons of mass destruction,
but there were none. Then it was making Iraq a democracy, but yet the
“insurgency” worsens. Now the president has decided that in order to
honor those who died for nothing, more must die for nothing.
At present, 2,241 of my brothers and sisters in arms have died. In some
way, they may be the lucky ones. Over sixteen thousand others have been
wounded in this war, thousands more than planned. The term wounded
sounds sterile, bland, and inoffensive. But, in reality, many of them
have been so horribly damaged that medical science had to create a new
word to describe their wounds: polytrauma. These people would have died
in earlier wars, but because of the gallant efforts of brave doctors
and medics, they get to live. They get to live with teams of ten or
more doctors just trying to get their broken, mangled bodies through
another day, as their families look on in horror. They get to live in a
physical and emotional hell, not able to recover and not able to voice
the pain they feel or the psychological demons they face. All the while
suffering with a Veterans Administration under funded by nearly three
billion dollars and unable to care for them in the manner they deserve.
So which one of us supports the troops? You, who has never set foot in
Iraq and wants to leave my brothers and sisters there until they
complete whatever the undefined mission of the week is, or me, the
veteran of this war who has seen the carnage of battle, the rampant
indifference of my countrymen, and just wants to bring my brothers and
sisters home alive and care for them when they get here?
Keep coming to the rallies. Maybe I’ll get through your thick skull
eventually. But remember I waved my flag in Baghdad, so you can sit
down, shut up, and listen to me.
Charlie Anderson served in Iraq with the Marine Corps’ Second Tank
Battalion. He is the Southeast Regional Coordinator of Iraq Veterans
Against the War.
He can be contacted at iraqvet4peace@yahoo.com
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