The first memorial I visited was that one, where my father’s picture is stored in a digital bank and you can enter the name and information surfaces on a computer screen. There he was, in his pacific Alpha’s (a uniform that is green wool), with all his medals, smiling at the age of 27 when he was first drafted. The roiling emotions took over my entire body. I grew up seeing that photo, and loving my father for what he did to “protect” our freedom. Next to the monument are the infamous words “Freedom Is Not Free,” carved into the granite wall. My father eventually died from liver failure, which was caused by Hepatitis C which he contracted on the battlefield through a blood transfusion from a Japanese soldier that they had taken prisoner.
So why do we do this as a Country? I walked around to the Korean monument where they had life-size statues of a platoon on patrol, and faces carved into another granite wall hailing the suffering and sacrifice of those soldiers. For what, I asked myself. I saw bus loads of visitors from all over the Country taking pictures with the statues, wreaths in the background, and against the granite walls, smiling and awestruck at our “heroes.” A guide was touting how freedom isn’t free and how our military is the most honorable and the best in the world. We should be proud of them. Small children with their own cameras were taking photos and looking in wonder at the soldiers standing in formation, battle hardened faces carved into metal.
I asked myself, why are these kids here? How could this be such an attraction? So this is where it starts, taking them on bus trips to the nation’s capitol and looking at war monuments. They are being indoctrinated from the inception of their lives that America is brave and wonderful because of its military.
I started thinking what wars we had fought that actually preserved our Country. That actually preserved our “way of life” here in the United States. None. We were attacked in Pearl Harbor, that is why my father at the age of 27 was drafted who had a small son, but then we dropped 2 atomic weapons on innocent people. Was that heroic? No, it was malicious and vengeful, and meant nothing to the security of our shores. The damage was done, people died, so now it was time to pay back the Japanese, a million times over.
Our military might equals imperialism. We train our soldiers and marines to kill and to be merciless, while we train our sons and daughters to be God fearing and loving. They have the best weapons that our money can buy, and are trained to use them on the enemy, whether they are an innocent civilian or someone who is threatening their lives directly. It is indiscriminate killing at the behest of a government that has its own agenda.
So how can you throw your medals away, tear up a commendation given to you by the highest General in the military, and not hate the military? I guess as my son would tell me, they do it for their battle buddies. And as long as this government, and we the people give this government the power to kill millions, destroy generations and then build monuments, this will never end. Those brave new breed of resisters must now stand up and throw off their military bonds forever to say they were not proud to serve in this Country’s armed services.
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