**This is an essay piece/blog that I wrote about a year ago after reading an op ed in Newsweek about letters sent home from Iraq by US soldiers who are now deceased. As a military wife, this hit me, hard, and I felt the need to express my dissent over this horrendous and unnecessary conflict in writing. Hope you enjoy.**
"...It might be easy to forget, but it's been six long years since America's Head Honcho started to wage the warpath that lead us to Iraq. Since then, more than three thousand servicemen and -women have died.
Are you hearing me? Three thousand people. are. D E A D. And Britney Spears' custody battle is getting more airtime than updates on the Iraq War.
Nobody is taking this seriously, least of all the court jester we've allowed to be king of our country. And I am disgusted. I can't look at the news anymore because it is filled with bad news, bad omens, and pictures of the dead. Every night, there are more dead, and the local news recaps those who lost their lives in Iraq in a collage of blurry pictures and footage of hearbroken mothers and wives. It is so overwhelming, I don't even have time to think "That could be me;" all I can think of is "Oh, God, this is...everybody."
The day we first found out Phillip's number had been pulled for service in Iraq, in my head I used words that I never want to say. And then....I had no words. No words in any language for the effects of this massacre. No words, no actions that humans are capable of performing could be sufficient punishment for George W. Bush and his administration of liars, pigs, and thieves. My husband was excused on a God-given technicality: six inches of steel in his right leg kept him from becoming Bush's next victim in the war on terror. But this isn't even about me or mine anymore.
This life that America has once known....is gone. We will not prosper, we will not grow, we will not find contentment until this strife is over. And even then, life will never be the same. Three thousand families have lost a vital member. Mother, brother, sister, father, daughter, son. Vanquished. Vanished. And we are no better off. For now, no one will know it. No one, outside of all those grieving for loves lost, will realize what it is that we have truly done. But the time will come when all eyes are opened, and we see what America's tremendous greed and sanctimonious hypocrisy has done to the health of its populace and its international reputation.
There are no words, but I can try. To the families of those missing their loved ones overseas and, especially, those who have been forced to permanently miss them, I am sorry from the depths of my being that such a despicable fate should have befallen you. Though this war is by no means an honorable thing, it is an honor to rise above this mess and make the ultimate sacrifice for duty.
To President Bush and his stodgy GOP pals who at this very moment are probably busy drinking their brandy and gloating over their seemingly limitless power, I say simply, beware. I may never be able to describe the degree to which you turn my stomach, but there will come a day when God or country is going to show you. And on that day when the horseblinders come off and at last you see the truth, I hope that the benefactor of your pain treats your life, your body, with the same flippant disrespect with which you have treated that of our most precious resource-- our men and women in arms.
To the people reading this message, whether one or one thousand, I implore you to be wise. To be cognizant. To look outside the bullshit propaganda that you are spoon-fed daily and grasp the seriousness of our situation. This is your apocalypse. Right here, right now, people are vanishing, swept into a desolate land, never to return. Nobody said it had to happen all at once.
So what are you going to do about it?
