We are not a military family. My father served stateside in the Korean war. None of my siblings served in the military. There was a point where my husband thought it would be a good idea if Katee wanted to enlisted. I nixed that idea. We are not lucky people. We do not win lotteries. But I have a feeling we would be "lucky" when it came to body bags.
The one family memory I have of the military is when a cousin came back from Vietnam with severe facial and brain damage. "He's just different now," was the only thing my mother's family would say.
On KTBS last night there was a story of a Shreveport mother who served in Vietnam and was now proud that her two sons were heading off to war. I watched the young man in the story and saw fear. The mother went on to say "I knew the day they enlisted, that they would face the reality of being in Baghdad." The youngest kid is a senior at Byrd and will be leaving for basic in May.
Faiza Al-Arji is a Baghdad mom who blogs. When bombs started raining down in her city in March 2003 she went to the flower shop to buy roses because she wanted to be happy in the last moment of her life. Al-Arji says the meaning of "Marine" in Iraq is murderer.
What's the chance that these two mothers of sons will ever sit down and chat over a cup of tea? I say this in my most radical feminist voice isn't that what being a woman is all about?
5 comments:
Lysistrata, baby.
And that is all I can say without going into an angry, offensive rant.
Lysistrata, baby.
And that's all I can say without launching into a long, angry rant.
Lysistrata, baby.
And that's all I can say without launching into a long, angry rant.
OK, they give me an error, don't show up, and NOW there's three of them? My apologies, though blogger ought to be apologizing. Puh-leeze delete.
Wow. First of all I had to look up Lysistrata.
You gotta love Blogger. You never know what the thing's gonna do.
And here's my thing about deleting comments. Whenever I go to a site with deleted comments I go "oh my, now what did they say to get deleted?"
It occurred on Trudeau's blog several months back and I was all about wanting to know what had happened.
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