With all the flap about Wesley Clark's statements, I think
this was worth sharing.While Jack was in Vietnam, his unit came under an ambush. Several men were killed almost instantly. Others scrambled to take cover from the enemy attack. Jack left his position of relative safety and ran into the line of enemy fire to retrieve a radio carried by an officer who had been killed in the ambush. With that radio, Jack called in air support that very likely saved the lives of himself and the other survivors.
When he got sick as a result of spending his good years fighting their unnecessary war, he did not get state of the art medical treatment and the care befitting a man who made the sacrifices he made. The government that sprayed harmful chemicals on him ignored his pleas for help, but Karl Rove was not apoplectic with outrage.
When Jack died in his early 50s, he did not get the wall-to-wall news coverage that Tim Russert got. His family simply got an auto-pen letter from GW Bush, and a flag folded into a triangle.
Let's remember the bravery and sacrifice of all who serve our country, in uniform and out, this Fourth. And let us never dishonor their sacrifice by glorifying war in any way.
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Great comment on WesleyGate in this NYT Op-Ed from Gail Collins:
ReplyDeleteThere was a time when this might have had some traction, but we’ve had so many calls for so many people to be fired lately that it’s gotten ho-hum. We yearn for the good old days when people saved proposals of employment termination for larger errors, like, say, mismanaging an entire war, or subverting the Constitution.