Perhaps it's a bit hypocritical, with having a blog myself, but I just don't read blogs very often (aside from my friends, of course). I know that this is the zeitgeist, and everyone talks about how weblogging in the medium of the early 21st century, but I just don't follow those.

Guess I just can't get into them.

All this said, while bumping around the intertubes today, I found myself on a military blogging site (The Sandbox). I know that this shouldn't really be news to anyone, but it is the thinks like this that just depress the hell out of me more than anything else. Maybe I am partisan, and against Bush's War before it even started in '03, but I really wish that more people read these-- its too real.

It's a real privilege to live in a nation which handily has the most capable and powerful military force on the planet, and to remain a civilian. I think that the current U.S. armed forces number around 1.1 million (active plus reserves), which means that this accounts for about 0.3% of the total population. I'm pretty sure that I know more than 300 people, and until yesterday when I found a high school friend on facebook who enlisted after the Catastrophes of 2001, I know none. (To be completely fair, I haven't even spoken to him yet, so the number is essentially zero). In all truth, I think that most of the people I know don't know someone who is there. This insulation is at once unsettling and confusing.

About a week after the towers collapsed in New York, I found myself at the site, before the cleanup, before (literally) all the dust had settled yet. There are few experiences in someones life which can truly be described as haunting, but that is what the ruins in Manhattan were to me; it forced a detachment because it was too real. So many Americans--myself included-- have been fortunate enough to think of destruction and war as an abstract thing that happens "in other places" and only exists to us in history textbooks and movies; and then I think of the men and women in the deserts of the Middle East who are immersed-- quite literally, as one who drowns-- in war.

War is no stranger to this part of the world, or even to America, and the blood shed in the sand will join with the countless others who have fallen in battle in the millennia since the first cities in the land. How does one deal with history in the "present-tense"?

I tried to read as much as I could on the page, but each line of text was another impact. All of us are well aware of the scars-- physical, emotional, psychological, financial, familial, and social which every enlisted man and woman in the War has, are, and will face. This is reality, this is the world of man's own hand.

Today, I know one man who has been to Afghanistan, but in a year? I teach seniors at a high school, and too often I wonder which one of my students will know the trauma and pain from which I have been free? There are so many "ripe" eighteen year olds, and I see the recruiters in the school; I seek no malice against these men, they do their jobs, just as those around the world in uniform are commanded to do, and thank all the goodness and luck in the world that they had the good fortunate to be stationed in a school in Massachusetts.

The feeling after reading these blogs can probably best be described as "hollow." It certainly makes most things I do in an average day seem trivial.

Yes, this is a jeremiad of sorts that I have seen no real war, and I have no desire to ever. It takes a certain bravery to volunteer for such service, and this is simply not a part of who I am. It's angering to think that this bravery has been taken advantage of. A war is a war, and it is always sacrificial, but all things about this aside, how is this even being done correctly?

The purpose of Bush's War aside (I think we can all agree that there essentially was none), the handling of non-combat both in Iraq and America is sickening. There is absolutely no direct goal of our forces there other than "survive," and even less at home. The last two years has been filled with stories about how our returning soldiers are mistreated by their own government, whether they are on a two-month leave before returning to the Mideast, or home after wounded discharge. So many wearing uniforms have given so much, but what of those at home? The fools who have justified this as a "just war" have drawn allusions to World War Two; if this is indeed a war which must be fought, where are the victory gardens, the oil rationing, the volunteer corps?

An army does not go to war, a nation does. Our leaders forget this, and too many at home do. This is on people's radar, but for too many, seems to be a faint aspect of life, as what will be on television this week. There is a war, and the news will report on trivialities. Things like this will only re-enforce the adage of "If you are not enraged, then you're not paying attention"

Read on, think, yell. I'm not sure what I meant to accomplish with this post, there is no grand thesis, or point with this diatribe.
I suppose that's just as much like Bush's War.