This article was originally posted on March Forward! on Aug. 26. The author is a former infantry sergeant who served 28 months in Iraq.
This
month, U.S. fatalities in 2011 in Afghanistan topped 300. August was
the deadliest month of the entire 10-year war, with at least 67 U.S.
fatalities.
The numbers speak for themselves. There is no
“winding down” going on in Afghanistan. Fatalities are on pace with last
year’s massive spike, and have already surpassed every previous year of
the war.
An important question we need to ask is, what are we
fighting for? Why in 2011 alone have 300 husbands, wives, mothers,
fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins and friends been sent to their
graves?
The question is simple, so why are the answers so
complicated? Why are our loved ones being sent to bleed to death in
another people’s land? Why are hundreds of children growing up missing
their mothers and fathers?
We now know from Wikileaks cables
that Washington acknowledges that it cannot win the war militarily. The
U.S. government has been asking the Taliban to come to the table for
talks. Why then is Washington still sending us to die to “defeat the
enemy?”
The answer is simple: because our lives mean nothing to
this government or the officers that command us. The Pentagon is simply
using us as poker chips attempting to bluff their way into a winning
hand against the popular anti-occupation forces in Afghanistan. They
hope to hit the jackpot and win the billions in super-profits that
Afghanistan has under its soil.
The same politicians who use
words like “loyalty,” “duty” and “honor” to define what it means to us
as enlisted to serve are going behind our backs and secretly negotiating
with the same people they are telling us we must risk our lives to
defeat!
They like to claim that this has been a difficult decade
for “our country.” But they have been doing just fine. The reality is
that in this year alone over 300 different families have lost loved ones
while the cowards at the Pentagon and Wall Street, whose children never
go to war, plot their next move with our lives! No
one who is asking us to fight has done any of the dying. And polls show
that 2/3 of the American public want all troops out of Afghanistan; the
politicians are going against public opinion by continuing to send us.
The
reality is that many of us have served with courage and honor. We have
fulfilled the oaths that we have taken and we have stood by our brothers
and sisters in arms. But we have not been fighting to “preserve our way
of life.” The generals and politicians themselves cannot even give a
coherent explanation as to why we must continue to die in Afghanistan.
We have fought to preserve the parasitic existence of a small minority
of super-rich and to advance the careers of officers who do not care
about us.
This government has spent hundreds of billions of
dollars in Afghanistan. They have thrown money in every direction in
frantic attempts to gain control and have failed. They have no problem
chucking our lives up against mountains and bullets to be torn to
shreds. The people we shoot at are fighting us not because they are
“terrorists,” but because their villages have been bombed and raided for
10 years. We have far more in common with them than with those rich
politicians who order us to fight. The brass try to fool us, with words
of “freedom” and “democracy” into doing their bidding to support their
career advancement.
Even if we could possibly believe their lies
about the war, the suicides and lack of health care for veterans speak
for themselves. July saw the most suicides ever recorded among
active-duty service personnel in a single month. This is the result of
constant deployments, and the refusal of the U.S. military to provide
even a shred of quality mental health care. The military and its
government have no problems negotiating behind the scenes with those
they are sending us to be killed by and have no issue denying us mental
healthcare when we return. So why are we letting them throw our lives away?
We
don’t have to; we have the right to refuse to die for the reckless,
pointless orders of rich politicians. More and more service members are
standing up every day, and you can too.
