Oct 30 2008
Thank you Cody Eggleston
When I take a few steps back and look at the Iraq war, I think it seems awfully barbaric in this day and age to be killing each other over our disagreements. I know that the word “disagreement” seems soft in the light of what we perceive as something that might end up in world disaster, however, I will use that word just as a placeholder for all wars for all different reasons. But, you must agree that it does seem like we could find a better way by now. If you think about it, most of us don’t live within a violent life day in and day out. Oh, I know there are some, but not most of us. So, when you think of our young men and women being thrown into situations of killing and being killed, it just feels strange and almost unworldly.
I do think that with this war it almost disappears for us much of the time, especially as the presidential campaign busied us full force on the TV. And then, of course, the housing market and economic downturn has kept us pretty stressed out. We’ve all but forgotten about our own people being shot and killed for - what reason was it again?
If you are old enough to have lived during the Viet Nam War you remember seeing body bags containing dead soldiers coming home, depicted on the evening news (every day). We’d get a count of how many Viet Cong we had killed and a lesser amount of how many of us they had downed. Of course, the numbers never made sense and I guess we killed every North Vietnamese several times over by our military count. I’m not sure I cared about their numbers at the time, but the visual of those body bags remains burned into my memory (forever).
Isn’t it interesting that we have no such visuals with this war? Who has censored our nightly news and American press? Is it the current president and his administration? And we also haven’t heard much from McCain or Obama on the subject, except for McCain saying we’d be in Iraq for another hundred years.
This all came to my thoughts yesterday when I read a post by a blogger who also included a video of McCain when he was very young and in the military - in Viet Nam. This blogger questioned McCain’s validity regarding his torture as a POW. He questioned if he didn’t receive his injuries in some other way. I cautioned him to be careful. I explained how “we” made a big mistake during the Viet Nam War by blaming the soldiers that were forced to go as much as we did our own government for such a war. I won’t judge McCain in any way about this issue other than to be appreciative of his service. This generation has not experienced a war draft and so this war does make it different in that respect. However, it also seems that the young men and women who have willingly joined, can’t seem to get out and are sent back over again and again - how is that right?
The video definitely got me thinking about the war of my generation, but what prompted me to write this post today was this morning’s newspaper. His name was Cody Eggleston and he died from injuries from fighting in Iraq. And he grew up right here in Central Oregon where I live. In fact, right in the rural complex of Crooked River Ranch, where I live. Do we only hear about the deaths when they are local? It seems like it is so. So this post is for Cody. Thank you for your service, thank you for your bravery. You are not forgotten and your life did matter. It mattered immensely.
