The nightmare continues…
From Pat Alviso and Jeff Merrick, Long Beach Ca. Parents of Marine who has been deployed 4 times
As a loving family, along with our son, who is a career Marine, we watched in horror when we invaded Afghanistan and the drumbeat for war lead into the senseless invasion and occupation of Iraq. Military families have paid dearly- over 4,000 of our loved ones are gone forever. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead. And it took all this time to finally get out of a war that should never have happened in the first place? People like us who are fighting for justice and against the misuse of our military are telling me they will believe it when they see it.
In our home, we take heart in the fact that our president has announced we will finally be out in December, even though this was a result of not being able to cut a deal with the Iraqi’s regarding troop accountability and that this was President Bush’s signed Status of Forces’ Agreement, not anything President Obama decided. Our son has been deployed twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. He is scheduled to be re-deployed again in January. For us- and so many others- the nightmare continues.
The War Has Come to an End – for Whom?
From Susan Handle Terbay
Over 30 years ago I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. I loved him from the moment I felt his movement inside my body and that love has never wavered. I nurtured him, taught him right from wrong. My life centered around him and his siblings.
That son went to war and returned a different son and I grieve. The military taught him how to take a life but not how to live a life after fighting in a war. The military taught him to disassociate his feelings – to become void of any feelings during a war but did not tell him how to allow feelings of love and joy to return.
The war I protested, the war that provided nothing to the world except destruction of humans from our soldiers to the innocents of the invaded country, has invaded the sanctity of my family and it never goes away. No one outside the family realizes the depth of wounds within our hearts as we watch my son’s struggles to heal and be normal in a society that praises him in one moment and completely ignores and abandons him in the next. We are his life-line and yet we are his enemy. It is a reality of so many military families of soldiers with PTSD. While my son suffers from PTSD – so too, do we as his family.
When the President stated that our soldiers were coming home from Iraq by the end of the year, I hesitantly smiled, waiting for the other shoe to drop and the conditions to be laid out. If it is true then what will our sons and daughters be coming home to in our country? Praise, of course; heroes, of course and then when all the glitter is gone what is left but a soldier and his/her family struggling to heal the wounds that forever bleed and to find laughter again when overwhelming sadness prevails deep within a soul. Society has a short memory and will turn on these young men and women if they fail to live up to our high standards of living. We used them and now we are done with them attitude has to end in this country and it is time we start to respect life of all humans.
The war is coming to an end but is it really?
When will we ever learn? Now is the time. Now let’s bring them home from Afghanistan. Now let us learn to live in peace and not have knee-jerk reactions that lead us to war and worse the loss of our young men and women – physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally. Now is the time to be the country who leads the world in life and living in peace and not the country who leads the world in its destruction.
War destroys so much and it never, ever ends for those it consumes!
