Friday, July 02, 2004

Read. Now.

Tears. Fill. Eyes.
I was born in 1958 and came of age when the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement were both in full swing. It has taken me years to put this into words, but I believe that as bad as that war was, the legacy of the anti-war movement was worse. The anti-war movement gave rise to the moral superiority of non-involvement and non-commitment. While that may have worked to help draft-dodgers sleep at night, it's not much of a strategy of how to go through life. Taken to its logical conclusion the message is: don't commit to your county, don't commit to your spouse, and don't commit to your kids, church, or community. Don't commit to cleaning up your own mess or any cause that demands any more from you than rhetoric. This was the mindset in which our country was firmly stuck. Until 9/11, some woke up. Kids came down and joined the service. To the dismay of some of their teachers, parents, and the media elites, they came down here and raised their hand in front of the flag. And they are still coming to the shock of the non-committers. The Marines have more enlisting than their two boot camps can handle.

And we are all here together for Memorial Day 2004. Old National Guardsmen, grandfathers, and single moms, Texans and Mexicans, Surfers and Rednecks. A few weeks ago an Illinois National Guardsman, mother of three, was hit six times, saved by her body armor, but lost part of her nose. She stayed on her 50 caliber, firing on the bad guys, protecting the convoy. She said she was thinking of her kids and the guys she was with. Commitment is love acted out. It is sad that the non-committers missed that. They and their moral high-ground haven't been near a mass grave. The kids I see and eat with every day still want to help this country, in spite of getting shot at while doing it. That is love acted out. You either get it, or you don't.

During my time in Iraq I won't be able to see any of the Biblical sites that are here. But a few weeks ago in Taji I got to stand on some holy ground, where a father died when he went to war just to be with his son.

Sincerely yours,

Steven P. Unger

LCDR, CHC, USN

Multi National Corps-Iraq

Lights out.
Rescued by the red pen ...

Thursday, July 01, 2004

They Will Not Forgive

Ho Hum. No reason to change THE PARTY LINE of course. Can't be confused with facts you know... And no grudges could be held of course:
CNN/NYT/BBC were terribly inconvienced to have to travel to a third world hellhole and not see masses of smug arrogant Americans dying in droves. They will not forgive.

Sterilization Conspiracies

spotted on Pejmanesque:
The following quote is -- quite simply -- horrifying:

"Beheading and hostage-taking are not legitimate in Islamic law," said Riyadh Hussein, the white-turbaned imam of a soaring new mosque in downtown Baghdad. He suggested that the hostage-takings were the result of some unspecified conspiracy. "I have no doubt some of our people gloat over it. But this is being done to destroy the image of the resistance and the image of Muslims in the rest of the world. I feel there are some pockets of extremists in the Islamic world who are motivated and manipulated by Americans or others."

How does WaPo justify printing the ravings of a conspiracy nut??? Oh wait, I forgot...it is WaPo after all...

Along the same lines, I was reading in this weeks's Economist that polio rates in Africa have soared because some idiot Islamic cleric preached that the Polio vaccine was a Western Plot to sterilize Muslims....
It turns out that sterilization primarily affects the neurons -- who'd a thunk it? And then the coup de main:
remarkable isn't it how the conspiracies of the Arab street have been adopted, maybe even topped by the conspiracies of the Democratic Party Underground, MoveON, etc.
Don't call them DUmmies for nothing...