![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Man. Even though I live here inside the Beltway, and have driven past Walter Reed a hundred and two times, it really didn't seem real to me until this morning. ---, who's in the Army, was telling me how his boss wanted to transfer him back to the assignment he'd had at Walter Reed. He was taken off the assignment last year when he reported some of the shit was going on, and was basically told to shut up, and he told me how when his boss called him into his office the other day he was really hoping it was to be told he'd be subpoenaed to testify before Congress, so he could tell them exactly who needs to be fired.
I hope they do. I can be as pacifist as I want, but a country has to take fucking care of the people who are willing to die for it. Hell, the VA is incompetent and we have to regularly threaten to bring in the media if they don't get their act together and give my grandfather something vaguely resembling competence, but at the very least they pretend to care. So Iraq isn't the Greatest Generation fighting the prospect of global fascism; so we're disillusioned with an ill-planned war and the idiots who lied us into it; it doesn't mean the soldiers don't fucking matter.
And it pisses me off that because I was against this war from the beginning, I was accused of not "supporting our troops". And to be honest, a lot of this outrage now, just feels false. Feels like politicians using tragedy yet again to their own end. And I'm talking both sides of the fence, here. And I'll admit, I didn't feel deeply about it, more than in a sinking feeling of "here we go again", until I saw some real live human beings affected by it. Television screens and newspapers just can't add the personal element. I heard a girl say a few months ago that she wished she could take a baseball bat to her boyfriend's knees so he wouldn't be deployed; that stuck. Politicians pontificating just made the outrage into politics as usual, and I hate that.
And let's not even talk about the fact that there's still, years into this war, a BILL BEFORE CONGRESS to require adequate body armor for the troops. That just pisses me off to no end. One, that it hasn't passed, and two, that there even needs to be a bill.
I hope they do. I can be as pacifist as I want, but a country has to take fucking care of the people who are willing to die for it. Hell, the VA is incompetent and we have to regularly threaten to bring in the media if they don't get their act together and give my grandfather something vaguely resembling competence, but at the very least they pretend to care. So Iraq isn't the Greatest Generation fighting the prospect of global fascism; so we're disillusioned with an ill-planned war and the idiots who lied us into it; it doesn't mean the soldiers don't fucking matter.
And it pisses me off that because I was against this war from the beginning, I was accused of not "supporting our troops". And to be honest, a lot of this outrage now, just feels false. Feels like politicians using tragedy yet again to their own end. And I'm talking both sides of the fence, here. And I'll admit, I didn't feel deeply about it, more than in a sinking feeling of "here we go again", until I saw some real live human beings affected by it. Television screens and newspapers just can't add the personal element. I heard a girl say a few months ago that she wished she could take a baseball bat to her boyfriend's knees so he wouldn't be deployed; that stuck. Politicians pontificating just made the outrage into politics as usual, and I hate that.
And let's not even talk about the fact that there's still, years into this war, a BILL BEFORE CONGRESS to require adequate body armor for the troops. That just pisses me off to no end. One, that it hasn't passed, and two, that there even needs to be a bill.