The real toll: 19 y/o girl visits boyfriends' grave.

[Cult]

This war is a travesty.
From The WaPo

<snip>
It is but one white crest in a sea of thousands, but Kira knows Colin's grave like home.

She comes to it in the morning, before the air fills with the sounds of idling tour buses and rifle salutes. She comes bearing gifts, an armful of fresh flowers or some plastic ones when it's cold.
Arlington National Cemetary shelters the remains of a young Virginia Marine's romance.


For more than three months, she has come to Arlington National Cemetery to talk to Colin about the minutiae of her life, to kiss his narrow white headstone topped with a Star of David and to stretch out her slim body next to his as if they were lying together again.

Kira is no war widow. She is 19, and just barely, at that. The young couple's only talk of marriage had been a joke about their similar last names, hers Wolf and his Wolfe. But they fell in love at once, the kind of reckless, consuming love available only to the young.
</snip>

[benddem]

1. this is so sad

but then so are the other 3005 stories.

[saigon68]

2. They died for nothing

all of them

[Ezlivin]

4. Not nothing.

They died for (your choice):

1. The oil industry
2. Halliburton/KBR profits
3. Ghost WMD
4. To enact Georgie's revenge
5. The Military/Industrial Complex
6. Faux freedom
7. To divert our attention from many other pressing problems

[saigon68]

16. All of the above

[kestrel91316]

11. They died so spoiled Americans could have cheap oil, and the other

goodies that come with it, like fresh strawberries in December, and oranges in August, and imported tasties from Trader Joe's (and mind you, I too like TJ's).

They died so we could continue our 50-mile daily commutes and live in our McMansions out in the countryside, where we live on former prime farmland and yet grow NONE of our own food.

Some days I get so angry, I swear we DESERVE the horrible fate that lies ahead if we don't change our ways.

[Benhurst]

5. As are the other more than 600,000 stories.

[XOKCowboy]

3. I saw this when I was in high school...

and guys were going off to VietNam. Yeah it was young love but it was still love and it devastated those young women at the time. Very sad story. Such a travesty.

[TahitiNut]

10. I couldn't help but think at the time that there should've been some way ...

... to 'match' all the grief-stricken young women who lost a guy they loved in Nam to some of the guys who returned from Nam to wives and girlfriends who'd 'moved on' to someone else. It was so overwhelmingly destructive of relationships - almost NOBODY put the star flags in their windows in those days.

[XOKCowboy]

12. Yeah I remember those also...

It all comes down to young love. It's intense but fleeting. The young women who lost their "high school sweetheart" would always wonder how it would have been with their first "true love". Statistically without the war, they'd probably have married too young, had a couple of kids and been divorced within 10 years. But they never know if they might have been one of the lucky ones if he'd made it back home.

Very sad.

[ecstatic]

6. That was moving

RIP Colin Wolfe.

The most moving part of the story for me is the way Colin's memory will forever be perfect in her mind. I really hope she can move on and love again. She is still so young, with plenty of time to meet someone new.

[Warren DeMontague]

7. You can't say the Bush Administration doesn't care about kids like these.

I mean, with any luck, they were sufficiently indoctrinated by a government funded, thinly veiled Jesus-based "Abstinence Only" program so that they never had sex. You know, since they weren't married and all.

[Hav]

8. .

Very sad story.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

9. I hope she can find peace

My stepfather had an aunt who married his uncle just before the uncle went overseas in WWI. He never returned. She went on to marry again, but was never really happy, as no one could match the ideal of her first husband who she never really got to know. May this 19 year old cherish fond memories but be able to move on with her life.

[nosmokes]

13. K&R This needs to be required reading for every mofo that voted for going to

war w/a country that never attacked us and posed no threat, and did not have the gumption to stand up and ask the hard questions that it was their job to ask before we send young people off to bleed and die in our name. a pox on every fucking one you. didja think you were voted into office just to hold the chair in place?

at least have the huevos now to get us out of iraq before we create more colins and kiras so that gas is a nickle cheaper and billybob can keep driving his suburban to the grocery store 2 miles away 3 times a day.

[ninkasi]

14. True story of young love in times of war

My grandfather built the house I was born in in 1939. I was born there in 1943, when my dad was in the army. My grandparents had an acre of land, kept chickens, a milk cow, and tended a vegetable garden. The people who lived on the acre next to them built their home at more or less the same time. My mother and her two sisters were about the same age as the two daughters who lived next door.

The younger daughter of the neighbors, a year or so younger than my mother, had fallen deeply in love with a young AF pilot. Her parents refused to have anything to do with a wedding, reasoning that she might be widowed before she could enjoy being a wife. My grandmother opened our home to the couple, and they were married in my grandparent's living room the same year.

The young pilot was killed in the war, but his wife always thanked my grandmother for the chance for the little bit of happiness she and her young husband were able to share. She married again later, after the war was over, but always remained close to our family. Her mother and my grandmother were estranged for a time, but made up later. Who knows if my grandmother's decision was right? She later told me that she was afraid that if Evelyn hadn't married her love, she might grieve for the marriage she never had. She was able, however, to heal knowing that she was her pilot's wife.

War destroys more than the soldiers who fight. It destroys those who love the fallen troops, and those who will always live not knowing what their lives might have been, if not for the war. The enormous pain this illegal war has caused, on both sides, is something that will forever be on Bush's record, and he is accountable to each and every victim.

[qanda]

15. I'm sorry, but that's just not healthy

I understand that she's grieving and that her feelings and emotions are very real, but she has her whole life ahead of her and at some point she is going to have to reach an acceptance of what has taken place and move on. She has mourned him longer than she actually dated him.

I think the boy's mother is right, this girl's own mother needs to tell her to get a grip and move on.

[The Backlash Cometh]

17. Vietnam is repeating itself. A lot of young girls lost their loves.

[wicket]

18. And the beat goes on...

n/t