I mourn these deaths. Deeply.
And am enraged all the more at the futility.
You see, I did not know any of the people on that Chinook helicopter, and yet i mourn the needless loss of life.
I know they were brave and believed in what they were doing and that they were fully aware the threat of death was with them on every mission. They took that chance every time, and they signed up knowing that.
I mourn most for their families; especially their children. Those kids didn't sign up for this. Every day, they lived with the knowledge that their parent or older sibling could be killed without warning on the other side of the globe. No child should have to live with that stress.
Their worst nightmares have become reality.
In a more civilized world that alone would be called child abuse.
But this is reality too:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/3hbovfg
That reality doesn't make me feel any 'safer' in my cozy sheltered life in suburban america. If you think we're not fostering future blowback you're delusional. I worry what our (US) military actions of the past (nearly) ten years will mean for my children and grandchildren.
I can guess what my response would be if my neighborhood was bombed by a foreign government. I know how i would respond after my neighbors and family members were blown to bits via remote control, then dismissed by that gov as collateral damage while claiming to have killed one or two low level leaders of a tenuously disjointed terrorist organization.
Osama Bin Ladin is dead. How many more civilians should we kill? How many more brave warriors should die, and for what?
All the lives lost, all the treasure wasted, in response to an attack within the US borders that killed 3000 on 9/11 from nineteen box cutters..
How many more should die?
I'm not here to debate. I'm just here to point out what should be obvious. We (US/NATO) need to get out of Afghanistan.
We're not making friends. We're not bringing peace. We're not eliminating threats. And we certainly don't need to be killing innocent people in foreign lands to insure my right to free speech or make an insensitive statement about another's death.
fluffin' dammit. Declare it over and get the fluff out of Afghanistan.