Joseph L. Galloway: Shame on Them and Shame on Us

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/27/7918/

Shame on Them and Shame on Us
by Joseph L. Galloway

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Shame on them, and shame on us, for such callous indifference to the service, sacrifice and suffering of the families of the dead, wounded and injured troops who’ve given so much for so little in return.

Vice President Cheney again stuck both feet in his mouth by saying and then repeating that we should remember that our military is composed entirely of volunteers; that our troops all volunteered for this duty, this burden, this sacrifice.

What’s your point, Mr. Vice President? That because they volunteered to serve our country in uniform it’s okay to squander their lives in a war of choice, your choice and your president’s, and that it somehow matters less than if they’d been dragooned into service by press gangs or a draft like the one you dodged with five deferments during the Vietnam War because, you said, you had “better things to do”?

The 58,249 Americans who were killed in the war of your youth had better things to do than rest under their white marble, government-issue tombstones. I’m certain, too, that the 4,000 Americans who’ve died in the war that you and President Bush launched five years ago for no good reason and several that weren’t true had better things to do than die under your command.

No sooner did you and your boss begin celebrating “victory” in the surge in Iraq than new problems erupted in one of the most critical parts of the country, the southern Shiite Muslim city of Basra and nearby oilfields and ports.

snip//

Meantime, our volunteer troops - who comprise about one-half of 1 percent of our population of 300 million - soldier on, bearing the burden and making all the sacrifices on behalf of all the rest of us.

The war that Americans don’t want to know about drags on because its authors don’t care what you think or even if you think. In fact, they’d prefer that you didn’t think or ask any pesky questions that they can’t answer without lying.



Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.

[indepat]

1. From DC's cavalier callousness, one could get the impression he does not give a

shit. :D

[catnhatnh]

2. They never volunteered to die....

though they recognized the risk and accepted it.That was their covenant. Your's Mr. Cheney was never to waste even one life. Who held to their promises and who colluded with the oil companies to commit war crimes. My citizen's covenant now requires me to speak out until you are called to account at the Hague. I won't curse or capitalize....I will only remember and testify, because in the last Holocaust they were right to demand "Never again!".