"60,000 Marriages Broken by Iraq, Including Mine" - gutwrenching personal account

[Ugnmoose]

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/48788/

snip

I was folding fliers for a high school workshop on nonviolence when my husband, a mortar platoon sergeant with the Army National Guard 81st Brigade, walked into my office and said, "I got the call."

We hadn't talked about the possibility of him being deployed for months, not since President Bush had declared, "Mission accomplished." But I knew exactly what he meant; I didn't know then what it would mean for us.

We weren't prepared, and neither was the Guard. The Guard sent him into harm's way without providing some of the basic equipment and materials, such as global positioning systems, night vision gear, and insect repellant, that he would rely on during his year-long tour of duty at LSA Anaconda, the most-attacked base in Iraq, as determined by the sheer number of incoming rockets and mortars, which averaged at least five per day.

Unlike active duty military, the National Guard had no functional family support system or services in place. While the Guard was scrambling to get it together, my husband was already gone, and I was alone, just months after we had moved to Seattle.

snip

Two months into his deployment, I got a call from him, and he said, choking up, that there was an "accident." Two Iraqi children were dead because he gave the order to fire a couple of mortar rounds. Several weeks later, he phoned again, his voice flat and emotionless, to tell me that the men he had dinner with the previous night had been killed by the same Iraqi soldiers that they were training six hours earlier.

This is the real human tragedy of this fiasco in Iraq that rarely sees the light of day. It makes me so livid I want to run out and strangle someone.

[AndyA]

1. And what was it that * and the Republicans were saying about the sanctity of marriage?

Oh yeah, gotta keep them homos from having the same rights as everybody else, but when it comes to war, to hell with marriage!

Gotta keep them fetuses alive, force women to have babies they don't want, but after they are born, to hell with them! We're not going to make sure they have access to health care, prescriptions, or anything else.

We'll just send them over to a foreign country to fight a war based on lies and then they can die.

The GOP doesn't care. Bush doesn't care. They did their part by making sure they were born and that no homos got married. Yes indeed, they have surely helped society and mankind!

:sarcasm:

[wicket]

2. K & R

:kick:

[dogday]

3. Marriage is another casualty of the Iraq War which

nobody talks about.. It is a shame and I feel so bad for these families....

[ewagner]

4. I understand

what the author is talking about.....

it's very, very sad....

k&r

[liberal N proud]

5. Family values?

The right wing keeps pushing the family values mantra while supporting the destruction of the families that are fighting their wars.

[Quantess]

9. Family values, my ass.

They'll just blame anti-war people for breaking up all those couples, because we wrecked their morale, or something. :eyes:

[Miss Chybil]

6. My son lost his marriage between Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's heartbreaking.

[The Count]

7. I remember Pickles crowing after 9.11: "The bright side, it brought families closer"

Being from NYC, I only noticed the shattered ones, but I guess the ones Pickles dreamt, had Iraq coming...

[Morgana LaFey]

8. absolutely chilling

not sure I'm up to reading the rest, but I'm going to try.