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I viewed the Fallujah link pictures through robot filter. The pictures slowly began to load and what I saw made me cry harder than I have in a long time. I think I started crying on the third picture. There's no other situation bad enough in my sheltered life to compare with this: What difference does it make if the man I love doesn't love me back? If I lose my job? If my home is rotting around me? NONE of this matters when I look at these pictures. All I can think of is my darling daughter here at home safe with me, asleep in her bed. Then fast on that is the picture of the two-year-old boy missing his leg, missing his father, missing his home--his life is hell now, that's all he knows, you know?
Remember the "Picture Them Home" posters we see at superstores everywhere posted for missing children? There is no amount of "picturing them home" here which will bring back to life these men, women and children. Their people and our people: Dead. This site was a long litany of "Picturing Them Home, Dead."
I don't know which was worse: The pictures at this link of burnt and limbless Iraqi babies or the baby-faced American soldiers who went out to fiught in the streets and never came back. They arent coming home alive. They never had a chance to even live. Most of them shown here are just 20 years old...their mothers and fathers, probably safe here in America, may only be thinking tonight as they try, "My baby is not coming home. Never, Never, Ever!" If I was one of those parents, I would give my own life to bring my son or daughter home alive. It doesn't work that way, though, does it? This isn't Lord of the Rings where we have magical powers, this isn't a bad TV show, it's not even a Reality Show; It's A PURE UNDISTILLED HORROR SHOW.
I hate the trappings and results of war. I'm a pacifist. This war seems SO WRONG that my normally wordy, hugely descriptive self cannot even begin to wrest words out onto paper to describe the emotions I felt as I looked at dead Iraqi's, soldiers on stretchers, bloody civilians curled up in the streets, blindfolded prisoners stumbling ahead of weapons rammed into their backs; weapons brandished by those baby-faced soldiers....and what are those black things on the dead people that look like flies? Shrapnel?
I've never been faced with the choice of whether or not to allow my child to join the Military. But I would just as soon imprison my own child than allow her to go to war. It just won't happen. Over my dead body will the DisUnited States of America conscript my child into battle.
I'm a negative, pessimistic person by nature. I hope things will turn out good, but when they don't, I'm never surprised. I'm never surprised that people don't keep their word or do the opposite of what they promised. I hoped for a long time that we would get the hell out of Iraq and let them run their own country. I didn't even understand why we were there. Now, my gut says it won't be long, and it will be our turn next to suffer. Somehow, some way, we are going to pay a heavy price for this "presence" of ours in Iraq; regardless of what the original rights and wrongs were; regardless of all the good we may have intended.
War isn't pretty. Don't show me any pretty war pictures. Don't show me Marines in dress uniform under American flags. Don't show me Humvees painted red white and blue. And don't dare show me a picture of any soldier raising his hand in victory. Go ahead; show me the dead and mutilated. Show me the white-robed victims lined in their mass graves. Show me the American soldier in his coffin. Show me the babies without faces. Show me the soldier with his belly blown out onto the street, who holds his arm up pleading "don't kill me." Show me and everyone else what's really happening in Iraq. Maybe it will stop then.
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