Time to remember

The weekend is here… and with it the official start of summer.. Memorial Day Week End is here, and with it the long weekend, cookouts and first of the season trips to the Beach. Charcoal grilled steaks and cold beer…or if you live in the right place, the first blue claw crabs of the season, all make it to easy for most of us to forget there’s a reason we honor the day.

Most of us can forget, not all.. The girlfriends, wives and children as well as the parents of the people we’ve lost in Iraq and Afghanistan know all to well. So do the now very old women who want take one last look at a grave marker in places like Arlington National cemetery before they rejoin the World War II soldier who lays under it…

More than 37,000 men were lost in the Forgotten war.. They’ve finally been remembered and honored with a Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC, it was long, long overdue… Now, before it’s to late we need to get as many of the surviving veterans as possible to Washington to see it. Time is starting to run out. even the youngest of those guys are now pushing eighty..only slightly younger than their older brothers who served in WWII



The soldiers who served and died in Vietnam. Men and women who served in the only war in our country’s history where huge numbers of young men opted out because they didn’t believe in the cause. It didn’t matter much to them that many of the men who served and died didn’t believe in the Vietnam War either. The ones who didn’t serve had many reasons, primarily personal safety, The ones that opted out were eventually forgiven by President Jimmy Carter, and got to live a normal life.. The ones who died because they served their Country with honor, regardless of their personal beliefs about the war, got their names carved in a wall…… but not much more



During Vietnam, the draft evaders anxious to justify themselves, and look like less like cowards started labeling of men and women in uniform murderers, baby killers and other things.. The media gave them all the publicly they could, and as we’ve found out since, many of the active groups engaged in slandering out veteran were funded directly and indirectly by the Old Soviet Union…. The very same people who were funding and supplying our enemies in Southeast Asia.. Do not misunderstand, Vietnam was largely a political war, and the politicians make it impossible for our military to win.

After 911 when President Bush took us first to Afghanistan and then into Iraq there were a few Americans who either remembered or had heard about the glory days of the Vietnam anti-war movement. They decided to tried to revive the anti military sentiment of the sixties. The American people weren’t having it. We’d learned to separate the politics of war from the people who fight and die. Spitting on returning vets was out of style.

I'm beginning to feel like
a refugee from the law of
averages-Bill Maudin

Overworking our troops isn’t.. Never in our history have the same people been exposed to combat repeatedly for such a long period of time. Third and forth tours in Vietnam wer relatively rare, many if those serving now are on their sixth and seventh rotation.. This takes a heavy s toll on people’s personal lives, kids grow up seldom seeing dad. Wives get tired not just of never seeing their husband. Marriages and relationships suffer, so does mental health.. We either need to get a more people into uniform or start disengaging… I would hate to see us walk away from Afghanistan without finishing the job.. We already have too much invested


That leaves us with one more option, it hasn’t been tried since World War II. What if the President simply told the Generals to Fight to Win, and got the Hell out of the way.