Washington Post; Pain & Pride

The Washington Post has an article on Sunday they titled After the Wars; A legacy of pride and pain, of course it’s about the current newest generation of veterans, and basically, it’s just how the Post blames Bush for taking us to war and helps veterans feel like victims of the Republicans. Of course they do a good job of that, if you read the comments after the article. However, there is a portion with which I agree.

The vets hail from families where service in the military is tradition: More than four in 10 have fathers who were in the military, and half have at least one grandparent who was. Almost 40 percent say all or most of their friends have served in the military. By contrast, a national Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in December found that 32 percent of U.S. adults had “hardly any” or no friends who have been in the military.

Slightly more than half yearn for their time in the wars. Of them, almost two-thirds cited the bonds they forged with fellow military personnel. “It was a unique time,” said Kevin Ivey, a retired Army helicopter pilot who spent a year in Afghanistan starting in 2004. “I miss my crew, the folks I was with, the organization. You make lifelong friendships in war.”

Many vets see themselves as a cut above the rest of American society, as noble volunteers who stepped up to promote and protect U.S. interests while the rest of the nation went about its business as usual. Sixty-three percent think service members are more patriotic than those who are not in the military; 54 percent think the average member of the military has better moral and ethical values than the general civilian population.

Almost seven in 10 feel that the average American routinely misunderstands their experience, and slightly more than four in 10 believe the expressions of appreciation showered upon veterans — often at airports, bars and sporting events — are just saying what people want to hear. More than 1.4 million vets feel disconnected from civilian life.

“A lot of vets find it easier to talk to each other, especially about their wartime experiences,” said Jennifer Smolen, who served in Iraq for a year with an Army Reserve engineer unit and is now an active member of a Seattle area American Legion post. “There’s a feeling that civilians who weren’t there just don’t get it.”

Yeah, I spent a night trying to drink Silver Spring, Maryland dry with some Afghanistan veterans and that’s pretty much what I told them, like the Vietnam veterans before them, they did what they knew in their hearts what most of the country couldn’t burden themselves with. When it’s all said and done, that’s what it boils down to. There are tough jobs that most people aren’t willing to do, especially if they have to put their lives and their families on hold. Besides, someone they don’t know will probably do the job for them.

But, if they do happen to know someone who goes to war to protect them, boy, you’ll hear mentioned in every conversation to prove their own patriotism that their cousin’s brother-in-law’s neighbor is in Afghanistan.

The readers at the Washington Post have a very low opinion of veterans and the troops and they make things up about them, like that teacher we talked about from Butte Community College last week.

They think that we don’t have a choice other than military service, that we can’t get into college because we’re poor or we’re stupid. But, they get into college, and most of them have to take remedial classes and get a four-year degree in six years. Poor has nothing to do with anything – everyone can get loans and grants these days. Especially if you’re poor. Maybe that argument worked well with my generation, but in this day and age not so much.

And who says that college is the end-all, be-all? My office was all college graduates and they were the dumbest people I’ve known. I went to college twenty years after I graduated from high school, and I didn’t learn a damn thing that I hadn’t learned already in high school. College is just an excuse these days to continue living off your parents while you put off making decisions about your future for four-to-six more years.

Obviously, veterans didn’t put off that decision. We hang out with each other because we already have life pretty much figured out. We know what real poverty is, and we’ve seen it. Poverty doesn’t exist in the US. We’ve seen the worst that people do to each other.

We’ve seen the government at it’s worst and at it’s best and we understand that there’s not much difference between the two. We also know the difference between a job and a profession, and it has nothing to do with a pretty certificate on a wall.

This generation doesn’t have hippies spitting on them in airports, but they have the media and the liberals doing the soft-classism bit in the job market. Every time a veterans farts in public, it’s news. yes, they run the news stories about the veteran heroes who rush into buildings, but those stay in the news for a day or so. But when a fricken World War II veteran shoots up the Holocaust Museum, it stays in the news for months, until he finally dies awaiting trial.

A bigot who was thrown out of the Army more than a decade ago happens shoots up a temple and the VETERAN part of his history leads the news for months. The lies and exaggerations get to the point where a 21-year-old can’t get a sales job at Macy’s because she’s too scary to put on the sales floor based on her experiences during her deployments.

Sure, it’s because the straights don’t understand our experiences, but it’s because the media only want to lead with the blood on our hands – the same hands with which we hold our children and hug our wives and stroke our pets. The same hands with which we begin friendships and do our jobs.

But the real killer of the article is this part;

Only 53 percent of them believe the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, and just 44 percent say the same for Iraq. Slightly more than a third — almost 900,000 vets — “strongly” believe the Iraq war was not worth it.

Yeah, well, ask any American if the world isn’t just little bit better without Saddam Hussein and his sons in it. Ask them if they wish bin Laden was still alive. I’m not going to defend the ways in which those wars were fought, but the fact that we needed to fight them can’t be diminished.

The Washington Post was never on the troops’ side while the wars were being fought, neither were many of the Washington Post’s readers and all that did was encourage our enemies. Touting our too-soon withdrawal from Iraq and the one coming up in Afghanistan probably contributed to “not worth it” poll result. al Qaeda is sitting pretty in Falujah and they’re kicking ass leading up to the Afghan election.

That can all be laid at the feet of the anti-war crowd who can’t support the military during a Republican presidency because of their petty politics. The troops have done their job despite who was in the White House and they did it without wavering, it’s too damn bad that the people they’re doing that for can’t give them the same consideration.

But, at least we have each other. And the only secret handshake to get accepted into our circle is to speak our name. Our name resonates across the generations, from each of our country’s wars. We have veterans from every conflict since and including the Korean War here and each of us has been accepted upon arrival. Well, with the exception of the liars.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

Category: Media, Terror War