Tears for Bobby Pope

RIP, I Heart Iraqis

Words are something that generally come easily to me. So the fact that I’ve been in a futile struggle to find the right ones for over a day now is an odd feeling. I am overcome with emotion that needs to be expressed, but the words simply are not there. As I sit and ponder, fighting a constant battle with tears of frustration and anguish, it occurs to me that perhaps the words in themselves are not the biggest problem. Maybe this inexplicable combination of sorrow, grief, rage, guilt, hopelessness, pride, patriotism, despondency, and utter and total confusion comprising my present countenance is just not meant to be felt at all. Maybe the situation that has borne these feelings is so inherently wrong, so unnatural, that there should need be no words to describe it. No one should have to feel this way in the first place. Things such as this should just not be happening.

A friend died in Iraq this week. He was young, beautiful, funny, and full of life. I didn’t know him for very long, nor did I know him terribly well. But I knew enough of him to care deeply for him, and to know that there are so, so many others out there who care deeply for him as well. He will be greatly missed. His loss is a great one for all of us.

I am angry! I am angry that I can browse MySpace pages at any given time and find soldiers in Iraq whose headlines say things like “The Forgotten,” and who list their occupations as “Prisoner of War.” I am angry that morale is so low there that a soldier remarked on the subject to me just yesterday, “How can you be low on something you don’t have?” I am angry that every single day, the Department of Defense issues yet another press release announcing the name of yet another casualty of this horrible, senseless war. I am angry that these men and women largely ARE ‘The Forgotten’, and many of them, for all practical purposes, ARE prisoners of war.

Many of these men and women have fulfilled their contract. Yet they remain in Iraq. They are there under the notorious stop-loss program, if you can really consider it such. I, personally, consider it breach of contract. They have fulfilled the terms of theirs, yet the government feels that they need not do the same. They are forcing these people to stay in service longer than they agreed to, as if their sacrifice thus far was somehow inadequate, and effectively making them slaves to the system. Or as a very eloquent friend put it, "prisoners of war." The message stop-loss is sending out is that enlistment in the military is a crap shoot in the game of life. What good is a contract when the only enforceable aspect is the part where you sign your life away? Is it any wonder that there are problems with recruiting these days? Even those who LOVED being soldiers, took great pride in it, were proud of what they were doing would no longer have their worst enemy enlist. They are angry, they feel forgotten, they are mad. As well they should be. They are being held essentially captive by the country they loved enough to volunteer to protect.

I have heard it argued by people who make me quite literally homicidal that these guys can’t complain, that they knew what they were signing up for. “They VOLUNTEERED,” I’m told. Yep, they did volunteer. They volunteered so that you didn't have to be drafted in order to preserve our great American way of life. All the more reason they deserve our respect. And all the more reason they deserve to have people making decisions who actually value their lives, and who put them in harms way only when ABSOLUTELY necessary and with the means and the PERMISSION to protect themselves effectively. Right now they have neither. They are caught up in a bureaucratic death trap, and no one over here seems to give too much of a shit. I do not understand it at all.

I am living in a country I recognize less with each passing day. We act like nothing is going on. The casualties are just names on a piece of paper until it is someone we know. Yet the world still stands still every September 11 while we remember a list of people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. What is wrong with this country? What is wrong with you???? We are over here basking in the ignorant freedom afforded us by these incredibly brave men and women who serve, and the vast majority of us don’t want to open our eyes and see what is really going on. We just stand behind our jackass of a president and gobble up the horseshit propaganda spoon-fed to us by the media like so many helpless pea-brained chicks. Why? Why doesn't anybody care? It doesn't make sense.

We all sit back and think that this war is so far removed, that it does not affect us, that we can not change it. We tell ourselves that it is not our fault. But it IS our fault. Every one of us who enjoy the freedoms that are afforded us by the constitution these men and women signed on to defend, we are culpable. We elected this president. We elected the congress. We sit idly by while this travesty of a war plays out. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his "Letter From Birmingham City Jail", "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." We are culpable.

The truth is out there. The soldiers are talking. Why isn’t anyone listening? Why, WHY won’t somebody make it stop?

to Bobby Pope, Thank you for the laughs. Thank you for your sacrifice. You will never be forgotten. To the rest of my POW's, (and you know who you are), you have my eternal respect, love, and gratitude. I am PROUD to call you all friends, prouder than you know.