"Our Voices Have Been Lost"

By Deanie Mills | bio

"What good does it do to speak out if nothing changes? Our voices have been lost."

Those words are made all the more wrenching by the fact that they were spoken in tears by retired officer Andrew Bacevich, Vietnam vet, graduate of West Point, freqent and outspoken critic of the Iraq War, on the death of his beloved son, Andrew, a 1st Lt. killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Mother's Day.

The interview was done on NPR's "Morning Show" yesterday. (I had trouble downloading the audio and so am quoting from memory, but the words, "Our voices have been lost," were burned into my brain.)

I could identify quite powerfully with Mr. Bacevich, who now teaches at Boston University. For one thing, his family has a long and proud tradition of military service, as does mine. He is a combat vet who has spoken out against this war from the beginning, and while I'm not a vet, I'm in a family surrounded by them, and I, too, spoke out even when it caused problems within my own family--even my own marriage. And yet, his son went to that same war, as did mine.

I understood exactly what Mr. Bacevich meant when he mentioned that he never did "burden" his son with his views on the war while he was in uniform and especially while deployed, because "he had enough on his mind." I am quite sure that his son was just as aware as mine on how his dad felt, but they respected one another deeply, as do my son and I.

When these guys are deployed, they don't need to hear about how badly the war is going--they can see it up-close and personal. They don't want to hear how badly the administration is handling strategy and tactics--they deal with it every day. As my son said once from a quick sat-phone call home from the Anbar, "We're fighting an unconventional war with conventional tactics and it's not working."

When they call home, they're under unimaginable stress and are so exhausted they can hardly speak, frustrated and angry and depressed, and all they want to hear is how their old dog is doing, how the family is, whether the bluebonnets are yet in bloom.

It is a terrible, awful feeling to hate this war and to love our warriors who go fight it.

We are wracked each and every day by the same terrors and anxieties as those who support the war, but we can't comfort ourselves with the platitudes that our loved ones are fighting for our freedom, or "fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here"--because we just don't believe it.....LINK