Don't care if it rains or freezes...
Two days after the Presidents visit to the troops on Thanksgiving the press is full of reactions. There is a degree to which opinion is breaking along the lines of pre-installed notions. Some regard it as a stunt, no different than the stunt on the Aircraft Carrier last spring. In this the Alternet article A Chickenhawk Thanksgiving in Bagdad is typical. They have their point, perhaps. I am prepared to see the President try to use this to his own advantage. In posters, in stump speeches, in television advertisements, in base political fashion. When and if that time comes I will be dutifully disappointed and then move on. Most of the press are willing to regard it as exhibiting leadership, at least acknowledgement of the incumbant. Some are labeling it heroic, that it is not quite and will be even less so, if it is handed over to Karl Rove. It is worth noting that if any President does well as President, does well by the American people, even in a single small way, he is of course doing well also, by his own party and cause. This can't and shouldn't be avoided. In their own time and in the most recent past the republican party refused to let a democratic president do his job. To the absolute limit of their ability to prevent it; again and again and again. In this they own, and are worthy of whatever blame accrues to them.
I see this for now as the right thing done. I have my reasons, these do involve my four years in the Navy. I went in during a - lets call it a resolutely atimocratic period of American history. Early in the volunteer force period, but after the first round of generous pay and benefits ran out. So here is an impromptu sea story I offer up. At some point in the middle of what Navy termed a WestPac tour on the Aircraft Carrier USS Ranger at the end of a long day in a period of rising tensions where the potential of our peaceful cruise becoming unpeaceful lay on the litorals beyond the waters where we maintained modloc. The ships chaplain came on the 1MC as he did every night just before lights out for evening prayer. Something was up with him this night because instead of the usual brief homily he descended into a long rambling speech about how our friends and family may clearly have forgotten us, our girlfriends and wives undoubtedly running around with other men. Our children rampaging wild in the streets. We must continue somehow to do our jobs and get it done, for the sake of people who could care less about us.
Being nineteen at the time and not having a girlfriend back home, and not being unduly concerned with how closely my family was following my lot, I was not affected as much as the others (plus I was working a twelve to twelve). I could see the looks; though, of all the other people in the room, who did have wives, sweethearts, children. I could feel their stunned pain and silence, sense the vacuum of having the spirit sucked straight out of them. The warmth of our comradery stripped from us, flung into separate existential wells. Shuffling off to their rack or to throw themselves into the sea. I know what it is like to feel alone, far out on a dark empty ocean.
I can't tell you why the chaplain did this. Maybe he wrapped it up with a "So remember folks. Jesus is your only friend". Maybe he had a bad day. Maybe he didn't realize what a downer he had put across. This I do know for the soldiers and marines in Iraq knowing that they are still in an active war, where they risk being killed daily. Fighting a war that is not well understood and increasingly unsupported. A war even its advocates and enthusiasts desire to be out the headlines and dispatches now. I know they feel they are alone and forgotten.
11:45:01 PM  ;;
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