Anchor Struck

I hadn’t planned on posting today.  There’s netting to put up in the garden and weeds growing like . . . well, weeds in spots we’d prefer they didn’t.  Jude and I are going out to dinner tonight, at which we’ll toast my friends Eddie Weekfall, who died in combat, and Jim Mathis, who died from his struggles when he got back to the world.

But as I scrolled through Facebook, a post just absolutely galled me.  I have a lot of right-wing family and acquaintances on FB, so I knew the flag waving would be extra heavy today.  But someone put up a photo of Old Glory superimposed over a military cemetery, with the caption “Our flag does not fly because the wind moves it.  It flies with the last breath of each soldier who died protecting it.”

I FUCKING HATE SHIT LIKE THIS.  It’s war porn.  It simplifies extremely complex political and cultural issues, then romanticizes death as those conflicting processes play out the worst possible scenario.  I watched many men die in Vietnam.  Some screamed, some cussed, some cried.  None of them said anything as inane as “freedom isn’t free”.  You can’t die nobly for an ignoble cause.

It’s especially galling to see the disconnect so many Americans have about who will take that last breath.  Today the U.S. celebrates its first Memorial Day since boots left the ground in Afghanistan, even as the war drums swell to put boots back on the ground in Iraq.  You remember that one, don’t you?  Political support for it was solid at first, but by the end the Pentagon had to call up the reserves, require multiple deployments, lower recruitment standards and offer signing bonuses to get enough feet for those boots.

A recent poll reported that 57% of 18 to 25-year-old Americans polled supported sending ground troops back to Iraq.  Oh, how I wish they had also been asked “and are you willing to be one of those troops?”

Jim’s lovely widow Dora sent me a video today of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s compelling Find the Cost of Freedom.  I would love it if the U.S. did just that: measure the total cost of war.  Not just the upfront costs of munitions, logistics, recruitment, training and such, but also the enormous toll of physical rehab, PTSD disability and psychological damage to the families who lost members.

If that was done, maybe this (skip to 1:41) would be the new national anthem.