Warrior to Warrior: Welcome Home

I would like to tell you that America, the nation you loved and chose to serve, appreciates your sacrifices and honors your service. But in reality, America's gratitude and appreciation is all pretense, a charade choreographed by war criminals to further mislead an uniformed and apathetic citizenry of sheep in order to encourage continued support for their agenda of killing and destruction. For most, members of the military are cannon fonder, an expendable commodity to be exploited when political leaders and corporate magnates believe it profitable and in their interest. In addition, when you are no longer useful and have served their purpose, they will abandon you to face the demons of war alone, no longer a "hero" but a nuisance, a burden on the economy, and a reminder of a war America would rather forget.  

As they "welcome" you home and "thank you" for your service, an "appreciative" America will begrudge you your "benefits" and deny you the health care you so desperately require to treat the physical, psychological, emotional, and moral injuries you sustained fighting their immoral and illegal war. As you attempt to achieve some normalcy in your life, you will realize that though you have returned home, the struggle for survival continues in earnest. And sometimes, when things seem most bleak, you may look back upon your time in Iraq and see death as benevolent and those who died in battle as more fortunate than we who are condemned to live as penance for the sacrilege of war. And, as evidenced by the fact that the number of Iraq veterans committing suicide may soon exceed the combat death toll, sometimes, when no help is available, and living with the consequences of war become unbearable, and seemingly nothing can make it go away, death looms as the only option.

It is at this critical moment, this tragic instant in time when life seems so tenuous, that you must realize that you have survived Iraq for a purpose. We who know war for what it truly is have a profound responsibility to again come forward, shoulder to shoulder, and bear witness to the truth about war. If our sacrifices and those of our brothers and sisters whose lives were devastated and/or cut short by war, are to have any meaning at all, we must raise our voices in unison. You are the next generation of warriors, of war's survivors and victims, destined to continue the struggle, not against some contrived evil of the war criminals' devise, but in opposition to war itself and in behalf of peace. And though it may be difficult, you must come to terms with your experiences, find a place for it in your being, and use what you have learned to continue the struggle against those who would use war easily, and sacrifice untold millions of human beings to forward their agenda of power, wealth, and empire. You must warn those war criminals who have hijacked our nation and have ignored our Constitution that we reject their mythology and their rhetoric of false patriotism and will not unquestioningly and blindly support unjust, unnecessary, and immoral wars. My generation's time is near gone and we bequeathed to you the onerous responsibility of becoming the gadfly that awakens America from its lethargic and apathetic slumber. I challenge you, therefore, to turn your pain to righteous indignation and outrage, to take up the gauntlet, and become a warrior for peace.  

[1] Richard Severo and Lewis Milford, The Wages of War, When America's Soldiers Came Home – From Valley Forge to Vietnam, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1989.