my son has not the verbal powers of expressing himself you have, but your words scream at me as his silence does or did. It's now 13 years after the Iraq invasion, only once he told me that he knows how many he had killed. That was may be six years later. I remember that and wondered ever since. When we knew he would be employed in the shock and awe invasion, I sent him the words of my grandfather on my mother's side, who went through wwI: "Don't volunteer for "hero" missions". In the end if you do the "hero" utter bullshit stuff or not, you are in the mess and have to deal with it for your life. I hate myself to not have tried stronger to prevent him from enlisting (he enlisted shortly before Bush was inaugurated. We didn't know nothing about the Bushies). He was so discouraged in his life that the recruiters had an easy task to talk him into it with the promise he could learn and go to classes while in the military, which turned out to be bs after all. I misjudged US foreign policies, never expected a "Bush" and a "Rumsfeld" and a "Cheney" and all their bootlickers could do that much harm. Still at times my son thinks that the military was the employer that was more fair with regards to be treated equally than any corporation ever would. And of course he is anti-war ever since.

It's a curse. I have to say that I believe the amount as to which people return from wars and be broken are also dependent of how burdened they were before enlisting and how burdened they are afterwards. Divorces, complicated lives as kids in complicated families, all of it becomes one huge melange of problems to deal with. It's not easy.

Lately I was overwhelmed with some personal stuff and one person, I would have expected the least to get understanding from, just told me: "don't blame yourself, time is everything, it can heal and you can forget (and she had the strong and desperate belief that "God is good"). Knowing what she went through, I have nothing but respect for her faith that kept her going. And it convinced me to not talk about things I haven't gone through myself and make judgments.

Her belief that time heals and forgetting is good reminded me why I hate the intertubes so much. Nothing is forgotten in the digital world. That's why I tend to believe that no matter what and how much we talk here, it will not help, but in the end it will make us sick. And we will disconnect from that technology to save ourselves.

Sounds like my late husband.

Be well.

Definitely worth saving, and re-sharing.

In the same way - and sorry to make it immediately political - that it catches in my throat when I think of the 4000 young Americans that then Sen. Clinton help sentence to death, the 50,000 more condemned to be maimed, and the 100,000's permanently traumatized. And we cannot forget the million innocent Iraqi's murdered. It is unfathomable, unimaginable, and unforgivable. And devastating to contemplate even for a few moments - black despair lurks in these thoughts. Maybe it's why so many choose to ignore or gloss over the horrible reality? Isn't it always the way it's been with war?

Thank you for sharing this.