A Salute to All Our Veterans

A new day has dawned, we have a new President-elect coming into office on January 20, and a couple of too-long ongoing wars in far places to bring to as honorable an end as possible, as soon as possible. With a hearty shout-out to all our veterans, especially those with whom we served all those many decades ago. Here’s hoping the new day will bring about the ‘right thing’, despite the distractions of economic meltdown. Real help for the tens of thousands of returning veterans from our current wars who have suffered grievous injuries. Schooling and re-training for all. Treatment for PTSD, even for the oldest veterans among us, war does terrible things to people’s minds.

So, in honor of our nation’s brave veterans, what follows is an edited repost of my experience the first time I visited ‘The Wall’ – the Vietnam War Memorial. It was May of 1985, we had been called to D.C. to testify at a hearing. We brought the kids, 15 and 16 at the time, since they had few memories of when we’d lived close enough to Washington to be there for the 4th of July, to visit the Smithsonian museums regularly, to picnic and fly kites on glorious spring days on the Mall.

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Remembering the Fallen 2008

It’s Memorial Day and we are not in Oklahoma or Kentucky to manicure gravesites or to solemnly place flags and poppies to honor our fathers for their service, or to recall our lifetimes of love and caring. We instead spent the weekend joyfully hosting the New Princess of the Universe (our newest granddaughter) and her beautiful, hopeful young parents.

The Oklahoma gravesite was manicured and decorated by family anyway, the Kentucky one – now so full of family that there’s no one left to tend it – was no doubt trimmed and swept as part of the spring duties of the groundskeeper, just brass plates in the ground beneath that weathered white marble angel in the sorrowful pose. Funny how life – and generations – go on as the past slips ever farther into the mists of time.

Since Memorial Day of last year, 624 soldiers, sailors, Marines, reservists and guardsmen have been killed in our “occupation” of Iraq. Diarist clammyc has details on each one, including age, date of death, branch of service and home town.

Today, when you’re watching the parade or grilling some dogs or enjoying the sunshine in a park or in the woods, remember these fallen and the fallen of all our endless wars – right or wrong – who answered the call and gave their lives. Maybe say a little prayer in hope that someday soon the world and all the generations alive in it may discover peace.

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America’s Heroes Treated Like Dogs

Warning: this will make you sick

The web page for Forever Friends Pet Cremation Services explains…

Pet cremation is a clean, sanitary way of saving your pet’s remains. Pet cremation is environmentally sound, providing an alternative to placement in municipal landfill sites, or for those who do not have adquate space for burying their pets.

The problem of taking up space in municipal landfill sites must have been a big consideration when an officer accompanying the body of a comrade to his final disposition discovered that the military had contracted with Forever Friends to handle the bodies of US servicemembers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Friday [May 9] the Pentagon banned the arrangement, which had been in place since 2001. According to a story in the Washington Post, Some War Dead Were Cremated at Facility Handling Pets, Pentagon officials say they don’t think human and animal remains were ever comingled at the facility. That will probably soothe the outrage of families who might suspect from this news that they’ve got some dog’s ashes in that urn or plot instead of their loved one.
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Veteran’s Day 2007: A Remembrance

It was May of 1985, we had been called to D.C. to testify at a hearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on a matter related to our past life. We brought the kids, 15 and 16 at the time, since they had few memories of when we’d lived close enough to Washington to be there for the 4th of July, to visit the Smithsonian museums regularly, to picnic and fly kites on glorious spring days on the Mall.

Because it had been more than a decade since we’d visited, we of course had to make the pilgrimage to The Wall – the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial finally installed below a berm years after that ill-advised war was over. The overall impression of the polished black granite wall etched with the names of the dead is somber, almost buried, unspeakably sad. My Vietnam-era veteran husband and I were in tears before we even got close enough to read any names.

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Limbaugh’s Dittoheads vs. U.S. War Veterans

My goodness! The war between Rush Limbaugh’s chickenhawk dittoheads and veterans of the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has certainly lit up the airwaves and internet for the past couple of weeks! It’s getting so heated that it just might be time to buy some popcorn futures (or take up dealing OxyContin…).

In case you’re one of the few who missed it when the fireworks started, right wing hate pundit Limbaugh (who got out of military service during the VietNam draft due to boils on his fat ass) created quite a stir when he libeled some Iraq war veterans on his daily radio show [date] by calling them “phony soldiers” and likening them to “suicide bombers.”

His beef wasn’t that they hadn’t volunteered to serve, or didn’t serve at the front for more time than they’d bargained for, or that some of them were badly injured. It was that they started speaking out against the war once they got home.

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