Supporting The Troops

Yes, I'm obsessed. Yes, I'm depressed. I don't seem to be able to get away from the subject. The killing and the maiming go on without ceasing, and my neighborhood paper continues to supply me with material.

Yesterday, again in the Baton Rouge Advocate, was an account of a Memorial Day tribute on the U.S.S. Kidd, a destroyer which is docked permanently in Baton Rouge.

A retired captain and now state appellate court judge told an audience of about 200 people Monday that supporting the troops needs to be more than lip service.

J. Michael McDonald, who served three years during the Vietnam War as an intelligence officer and then 27 more years in the U.S. Navy Reserve, said he’s worried that American attitudes are turning not just against the war in Iraq, but against the troops themselves.

The judge may be worried that attitudes are turning "against the troops themselves", but in fact, as I see it, Americans are doing a good job of distinguishing between the powerful people who took us into the Iraq War and the troops who lay their lives on the line every day to fight the war. We're not making the same mistake as in the Vietnam War of blaming the troops.

He told those gathered at the USS Kidd Veterans Memorial and Museum on Monday that he remembers having students at Brown University throw rocks at him in 1969.

He said he had friends who were spit on in airports. He also recalled a newspaper story from the time where a returning veteran was told that he deserved his war injuries.

I believe the good judge may be conflating two wars here, Iraq and Vietnam.

“If someone tells you they don’t support the war, but they support the troops, ask them, exactly, how,” McDonald suggested. “If they can’t tell you, they’re not supporting the troops.”

Now I realize that I do not have the judge's credentials. I have never served in the military. I have never fought in a war. However, I'll take a stab at telling the judge how the leadership who sent the troops to war could have supported the troops. Wouldn't the major responsibility to support the troops have rested on the shoulders of those who decided to send them to war?

The judge should be asking the question about supporting the troops of the Bush maladministration, those who ordered the troops into the misbegotten and catastrophic war, and the Congress who enabled them.

Here's what supporting the troops would have meant:

In the first place, supporting the troops would have meant refraining from sending them to attack a country which had not attacked us and was not a threat to us.

Once the leadership decided to go ahead with the war, based on a pack of lies, supporting the troops would have meant sending sufficient numbers of them to keep order once the dictator was toppled.

Supporting the troops would have meant supplying them with enough body armor and armored vehicles to protect them.

Supporting the troops would have meant supplying them with safe food and drinking water, instead of spoiled food and contaminated water served up by the maladministration's best friend, Halliburton.

Supporting the troops would have meant giving the very best medical care to the wounded - and not in hospitals with moldy walls and ceilings, and the best follow-up care to restore them to physical and mental health, sparing them long waiting periods for further care.

Supporting the troops would have meant getting checks to the disabled quickly and sparing them from having to deal with tangled masses of red tape.

Supporting the troops at the present time would mean bringing them home from the killing fields of this unwinnable war, beginning now.

There. I'm sure that this is not an exhaustive list. I'm sure that we failed the troops in ways that I have not mentioned.

Maybe I'm done on the war for a while, but don't count on it. Folks keep saying stupid things and riling me up.

UPDATE: I reworded this post and shortened it some and mailed it to the Advocate. I think it's probably still too long, and they won't publish it, but we'll see. 6-1-07