Thanks for sharing. Your experience and the picture reminds us, so many others suffer because of war.

A Just War would be worth such a sacrifice. Is the Iraq War a just war? Is it necessary? Have any of our late 20th Century and early 21st Century Southwest Asia wars been just and necessary? These are tricky questions, aren’t they? Some think these questions have easy answers. But when smart folks really reflect upon what it means to be a U.S. Citizen with voting rights and paid-up taxes and the right to protest, these questions about just or necessary life-risking wars should be quite vexing.

Smart folks must admit that our collective votes and tax dollars enable our power elite to use our collective might in international political economic games. Smart folks must realize that some of these games our power elite are playing are using our soldiers’ and their families’ lives, as if they were expendable resources, like jet fuel. Additionally, smart folks must realize that our power elite wouldn’t be using the political economic tool of war unless the power elite benefitted from doing so. It takes a lot of guts to think honestly and deeply about one’s personal political and economic contributions to our power elite, and our Southwest Asia wars. This can be a painful and sobering experience for many U.S. citizens who are smart enough to connect the dots.

Military war is just plain ugly. And it gets much uglier than the pictures you link to. Trust me. No photographs of living soldiers will represent the great sacrifices made primarily by our middle class, lower class, and underclass soldiers and their families during our Southwest Asia wars to me. I got the images of friends’ caskets being lowered into the earth to remind me of our desert wars. And, I know every single one of my twenty-something and thirty-something fallen friends would prefer to be alive, walking, and talking with their children, even if they were grossly disfigured or badly burned. So to me, sacrifice looks like a twenty-something mother and her two young children standing over daddy’s simple and small grave marker, amidst a great sea of simple and small grave markers, trying to figure out why their daddy had to die in a far away desert many, many decades before he needed to.