I’m always at choice.  It’s the only rule I can count on and I have come to accept with 42 years of reluctance.  At this point in my life I choose to ponder Iraq daily or even hourly because the country that I have been born into has done things to Iraq that deeply conflict with the laws that my soul knows and understands.  All aboard the Iraq War train.  I wish I was standing on the platform though like a citizen of France maybe or a citizen of any other country that didn’t invade Iraq in my lifetime, and just taking all this in from that distance.  I wish that lightening had not struck my train.

My soldier is home now, on the heels of a gunnery conference that begins today at Fort Rucker.  I really haven’t a clue what a gunnery conference is and I don’t feel much like caring today.  The bullshit in my life couldn’t have been made any more obvious than it became last night.  We were together last night and we were all together as well in the summer of 2001 in South Korea.

I lost my first grandmother in February of 2001.  That spring my mother’s sisters came to my home and gave me an envelope, in it was a modest sum that my grandmother had left to me.  My husband was in the middle of serving a year tour in Korea.  It was a tough year because our son was born disabled and wasn’t even a year old when he left so I took my gift from my grandmother and hauled the kids down for passport photos and we flew to Korea for the summer.

It was a wonderful summer too.  The housing on the post that my husband was sent to was all condemned so all the soldiers and families lived in the Ville as they call it with the citizens of South Korea.  We all ate Korean cuisine and our teenagers all got on a bus together and went to Lotte World and my husband took me to the world pottery expo there because I am a potter and potters love nothing more than looking at and buying other people’s pots.  I bought a whole set of dishes from a Korean potter.  They are beautiful.

I got to know my husband’s best friend a lot better that summer.  He does command sponsored tours to Korea as often as possible because he is there for two years plus at a time and his family goes with him.  His wife is Korean and they have two sons who have spent as much time with their Korean grandparents as they have with their American grandparents.

I also met Mel and Amanda that summer who lived a block from us and they had two sons then too but have three now.  Amanda was a fitness instructor.  Mel had been a Ranger before becoming an Apache pilot.  He is one of the few that in 1993 went into Mogadishu on a mission that didn’t go so well and survived.  In Korea he didn’t seem to be that comfortable being a soldier anymore and he was getting out.  I was sure that he had long ago moved on in life and was sitting on some beach some place sipping umbrella drinks until he showed up last night.  When a U.S. soldier “gets out” he is still in the reserves for awhile and Mel got to go to Iraq as a reservist and fly the hand me down airframes that the reserves get and got paid the no bonuses pay that the reservists get paid and that won’t happen to him again.  The guy who I met that summer is gone now.  The guy who survived Mogadishu and felt inspired to do something finer and more life affirming with his life than soldier has left us and in his place sits a grim faced father discussing last night with my husband and my husband’s best friend where the best bonuses are.  He’s signing up for active duty again so at least his wife can get decent wages for his combat time and he doesn’t have to fly crap in a war.

I read some of my words today and notice that I spell Barack Obama’s name wrong and I wonder how that came about.  He seems to be the front runner in the most important race in my personal lifetime right now.  I realize that it is part of the disconnect I feel with him, I suppose it was my ego’s freudian slip of an insult to him that only my freudian ego knows about and sits in the corner giggling to self over.

Who am I, this fucking person who listens to an Obama speech and sinks into darkness and the more people who cheer the darker everything gets around me?  I am an American soldier’s wife and the mother of his frequently fatherless children.  I’m a caring human being who has witnessed and taken part in lies and deceit that killed thousands.  I have felt very alone in all of this many many times and fearlessly allowed my mental melt downs to be witnessed by many……what the hell….I’m not going to live forever so all that won’t matter forever damn it!

Some Obama supporters say they are tired of fighting and I say that’s only because they are those of us who have a choice here.  Some Democrats seeking unity seem to be completely blind to the fact some of America is in giant pain right now and doesn’t have a choice of whether or not to fight if they intend to continue to live.  The abusers and the sociopaths that are in our midst and part of the what we WANT to be believe is OUR civil society……..I see them all too clearly and I don’t want to embrace them.  Every voice in my being, my inner child if you want to call it that, screams out “NO!” when it comes to embracing the sociopaths and just letting the “bad stuff” slip away.  A lot of that “bad stuff” has BEEN my life these past five years………so none of it really mattered and it was all just a bad dream or it was just bad unhappy ideas?  Then how come people are missing arms and legs and minds and how come people are flat out missing around me?  I hope this funk passes soon.  I really have a hard time tolerating Obama speeches right now and I really have a hard time tolerating all that “Let’s Get Fired Up” chanting stuff.  Remember, I used to be a cheerleader and I know how that shit works.  A pep rally rocks too but during the football game I couldn’t help but notice that when things were getting really real the only person who came to care about all of my cheering was somebody’s ole Uncle Pervy in his front row seat………..just sayin.

At this point I believe that any one of the possibilities that the Democrats have for a nominee would not leave us in Iraq if they became our next President.  Because the existing bipartisanship still has our soldiers as solidly in Iraq as they were last year at this time I still don’t claim to be Democrat and instead lay claim to being an Independent now.  Bipartisanship has brought me lots and lots of tears and heartache and night terrors and lost sleep last year over military service that provided no safety for any of us on American soil and may have in actuality inspired and impassioned further acts of terrorism.

So while John Edwards has an Out Of Iraq plan very similar to the other Democratic candidates, he sports one thing that sets him apart for me and that is this portion of his Iraq plans.

Clarify the Lack of Legal Foundation for the War

The 2002 authorization did not give President Bush the power to use U.S. troops to police a civil war. Edwards believes that Congress should make it clear that President Bush exceeded his authority long ago. The president now needs to end the war and ask Congress for new authority to manage the withdrawal of the U.S. military presence and to help Iraq achieve stability.

Now we can all speculate all day long about how and why President Bush has used our troops to police a civil war he created but I’d like to stay with the facts and just acknowledge that he is and he did.  And he did so without any oversight from anyone other than Laura for a hell of a long time.  Now he does so with as precious little oversight as he can manage to dodge, finagle, threaten, beg, borrow and steal.  And that shouldn’t ever happen to us ever again, I know it should never ever happen to our soldiers and their families ever again.  It’s time for people to be accountable.  After people are once again accountable for their actions I think I might be able to start making some nice.

Having one of those days.  Going to put my fears up and then maybe they won’t be swimming around my head today.  This is an accumulation of a month of starting to smell that smell again.  It started last month when a soldier friend shot an email out to friends that in the midst of Iraq and a group of officers he witnessed a full bird Colonel and a one star General come to blows and try to beat the hell out of each other.  He gave no names and at the time I didn’t really want any.  His email was just one of those holy shit things that we all send out when we have witnessed the impossible happening around us.  There was only one thing that I filed away from the email as a note to self and that was that there was infighting before David Petraeus cuz there was no fuggin plan.  Everybody was their own cowboy in the Wild West.  To have such a physical fists to faces fight take place post David Petraeus disturbed the little voice in my head.

The second thing that disturbed me and joined that voice was this comment yesterday.  That was finished up today by my husband phoning me and asking me to search the net for a war video he had seen part of yesterday that had an Apache helicopter taking out an insurgent car in Iraq but also taking out about three other cars with it on a highway.  I didn’t have the heart to look very hard for it today.  I heard the concern in my husband’s voice.  It was concern about when this happened because this can’t be our ROE under the Petraeus plan and have that plan have any hope at all.  We can’t just create that kind of damage at will and have anyone able to feel any sort of sense of security of any kind.  My husband’s too smart too for his own good.  I know there is more behind his concern than just seeing the last half of a video.  He’s picking up a vibe out there and the surge is going to be a year old soon and how long can these people keep this up before everyone is certifiable?

Don’t ask don’t tell came to visit my house on Sunday.  It hasn’t been a huge issue for me.  I didn’t see where people were being hurt and we know people in the Army who are gay and we just don’t talk about it and they don’t share their lives with us but as Armando pointed out not long ago where racism and America intersects, the status quo of silence is not going to be able to stand the test of time.

On Sunday I was hurt by don’t ask don’t tell.  I was hurt in the motherhood part of my soul and that’s my most tender part.  We live close to a gay military relationship but I’m not going to give details because people could be hurt.  Funny thing is that the person I’m most exposed to in the gay relationship that lives close to us doesn’t like me and I don’t like her.  Our personalities just clash.  I respect her humanity though and her personhood and would never desire to harm her so I’m going to be mostly silent here as I am in my real life and only speak about my exposure to her life in ways that make my point and leave her and her family safe.

I read a headline this morning that claimed that LCpl Justin Sharratt has been exonerated in the Haditha massacre.  The definition of exonerated is freed from any question of guilt; “is absolved from all blame”; “was now clear of the charge of cowardice”; “his official honor is vindicated”.  

I also listened intently to a Pundit Review Radio show featuring Justin and his father.

His father is upset because the press hasn’t jumped all over Justin’s exoneration.  He says that he is going to release 1800 pages of evidence that was previously marked classified that is going to clear all of the Haditha Marines in our hearts and minds. He claims they were operating within their ordered Rules of Engagement. To my knowledge the ROE that the Marines were operating under that day have never been made clear to the American people.  He claims that the Iraqi witnesses lied and refused to come to America to testify because they would now be in jail for perjury.  He claims that Jack Murtha lost it over the Haditha incident to advance his political career and not because he was a past Marine just shown photos of children shot in the head by American Marines.

I wait patiently for this mind blowing 1800 pages of classified evidence to be revealed and if I owe any apologies for my anger and outrage I will be forthcoming with any and all.  I’m sad that I deleted the most graphic photos of three small children shot in the head from my photo files because after I had written a diary of outrage I came to a place where seeing them everytime I opened my photo file stopped being a healthy thing for me.  I can’t find them on the net anymore.  I think I swiped them out of the TIME Haditha article.  If you have any better ones than I have up here I would really appreciate the additions. We won’t see official photos for a very long time because they are considered a national security risk like everything else is by these fuckers in the White House.  Here is a link after the commercial to the CNN report from last year describing drastic differences between what those photos that were shown to CNN seem to indicate and the story that the Marines involved told.

I think I know why the press hasn’t jumped all over Justin’s exoneration.  It’s because it isn’t that credible of an exoneration.  The press is often found lacking but I can tell from the way this father speaks that he has been doing everything to attempt to get the press to carry his son’s exoneration on the front page and there are reasons why they haven’t jumped all over this and it’s probably because for the most part the evidence is still a he said she said deal.  Justin was probably “exonerated” due to a lack of enough incriminating evidence and dead toddlers tell no tales.

I’ve been preparing my home for a surgery trip with my son and listening to CNN this morning while doing it.  Dubya comes on giving a speech and is being applauded when he says something about our efforts in Iraq addressing our war on terror problems.  I pop my head around the corner and the screen says he’s giving this speech live from the Heritage Foundation……UGH!