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Posts: 905
Jan 14 04 4:01 PM
Quote:When I joined the National guard, September 11th was only 4 months gone. Although I'd had a fairly pascifistic upbringing and had no desire to put myself in a position where I would ever have to kill anyone, I liked the idea of serving my country. I'm part of a generation that's been raised on vietnam movies, however, so I had a very negative image of the Army, I had alot of second thoughts about having joined but in time, I came to realize that today's Army is not the Army of the 60s and 70s.One of the reasons that I continued writing in this journal for so long, was to let people know what it was really like for alot of the soldiers in Baghdad. I tried to give a perspective beyond what we hear about in the media. In these days where you can buy an ANARCHY T-shirt or a Che-Guevara watch at the mall, it's so easy to gt swept up in hte image of a government run by fat old men trying to line their coffers with gold, greasing their oil pumps with blood. It's easy to think that Iraq is just a piece of land that a Jingoistic Presidential Prince wants to hold onto regardless of the human costs.I hated the way this war started. It took me along time to come to terms with my role as a soldier in Iraq, but with time, I came to realize that although the method was flawed, the result was freedom for the poeple of Iraq for the first time in 30 years. It's been slow going but we've made great strides in getting the country back on it's feet and no one can deny that the Iraqi people will be better off now than they were under Saddam.Of course, our media is obsessed with drama. Restoring power and starting after school programs don't even register on a scale that gives three paragraphs to a soldier's death. People don't hear the good things from the news and I'll admit that even I have trouble takig the things that come from the White House press room seriously. Nobody knows about the community center that my unit helped create where hundreds of children come every day to take Karate classes, play football, do homework, use computers. No one hears about the people who bring us food on the streets and take their children to shake our hands or just come out to say thank you or. People hear that electtricity in Baghdad is at pre-war levels but they don't realize that before the war, the old regieme tapped the entire power grid to keep Baghdad running; we brought Baghdad back without taking power from anywhere else. We established the first garbage collection system in Baghdad's history. We've arrested dozens of corrupt gas station managers, attendants and gas scalpers to keep gas prices stable for the people. Most importantly, I can't think of the last time I heard someone mention the sanctions which killed millions of Iraqi's every year and are now over. The only tragedy greater than the deaths suffered in Iraq is that so many of the American people seem to think that those deaths are meaningless.I have a whole new perspective on things now, and I agree that we need to get Iraq running on it's own as soon as possible. But we also need to remeber that an important job is being done over there. A job which millions of Iraqi people are greatful for. Despite what the media portrays, Iraq is not a nation up in arms waging a rebellion, Iraq is a country where small groups are waging a terrorism campaign. We have no choice but to finish the job we started. Anything less would be disasterous for the Iraqi people, anything less would mean that every person who's died there, did it for nothing. Wise didn't die for nothing.
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