Just One Soldier . . . . . . as related to Chris Hedges!

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Chris Hedges visited a soldier in his home.

I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary “Body of War.”  He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq.  He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him. . . .

This “telling of a soldier” is very sensitive and I think should simply be read without “pieces” so to speak.

Here, then is his (Chris’) article:  “One of First Iraq Veterans to Publicly Oppose War Will Die for Our Sins” Monday, 11 March 2013 09:44  By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

Chris’ article so gripped author, William River Pitts, that he responded in

“Waking From My Moral Coma,” Wednesday, 13 March 2013 09:07, Truthout | Op-Ed

In this article, Pitts questions his own moral fibre:

I’ve been having trouble with mirrors lately. When I look these days, I see a bastard staring back, a stranger, a guy who should be ashamed of himself.

He is.

A long, long time ago, I wrote this: “America is an idea, a dream. You can take away our cities, our roads, our crops, our armies, you can take all of that away, and the idea that is America will still be there, as pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind.”

I still believe that, and therein lies the problem. I am a sucker for that dream, that idea, and for the last few years I allowed it to seduce me. . .. .

But Pitts takes it much further from there:

and when I look in the mirror, I cannot meet my own eyes. I spent all those years fighting against everything that is ending Tomas Young’s life, I made documenting their serial crimes my life’s work…and then I let it slide, because Bush was gone, and I couldn’t summon the necessary energy to remain outraged over the fact that they all got away with the crime of the millennium scot-free.

It is enough.

I am finished with the moral geometry that says this is better than that, which makes this good. This is not good; this is, in fact, intolerable. Allowing the perpetrators of war crimes – widely televised ones at that – to retain their good name and go on Sunday talk shows as if they had anything to offer besides their ideology of murder and carnage is intolerable. Entertaining the idea that the billions we spend preparing for war cannot be touched, and so the elderly and the infirm and the young and the weak and the voiceless must pay the freight instead, is intolerable.

Read the rest of Pitts’ article ‘here’!

Every single American should be compelled to read the foregoing article by Chris Hedges, as well as William Rivers Pitt commenting on the article and himself.  

“Dear George Bush and Dick Cheney, You Are Guilty of Murder:  A Letter from a Dying Veteran”

“I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to beg for forgiveness.”

March 19,2013  Truthdig / by Tomas Young

Former Republican vice president Dick Cheney,

pictured in 2011, advised his party’s candidate in the

upcoming US elections to pick a running mate with more

experience than Sarah Palin.

March 19, 2013  |  

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all-the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans-my fellow veterans-whose future you stole. . . . .

. . . . . . .

Please continue reading here.

[Note:  TMC also made mention of the foregoing letter in ek’s

“Wishful Thinking and Lies, as well.  , a coincidence!]