Fuck! I can't read this week's Newsweek

[Taverner]

All letters from soldiers who have died, the lion's share of them starting with "If you are reading this, then something went wrong..."

I just can't. America needs to read these, our Reps and Senators need to read these, Bush needs these read to him...

[babylonsister]

1. I just got it, too...

:cry:

[AnnInLa]

2. It's an incredible issue

I was able to read some of the letters. I felt obliged. I guess the point of this issue is to say, that no matter the politics, no matter the right or wrong, these soldiers were just men/women who thought they were serving their country by being good soldiers.

[uppityperson]

3. Newsweek printed a bunch of killed soldiers letters? Wow. Good job.

Seriously, this sort of stuff NEEDS to be out in the public view more and thank you to Newsweek for doing this.

[Taverner]

4. The letters, their pictures, their stories

It's fucking heartbreaking. I couldn't get through more than 1 or 2.

[riderinthestorm]

5. I keep picking it up, putting it down, reading one or two and walking away

it's so damn hard. I feel like I owe it to these people though to read their words, acknowledge their efforts.

I usually pass my Newsweeks along to my local women's shelter after I'm done reading them but I think I will buy them their own copy and keep this one on my coffee table for a while...

:cry:

[Dinger]

6. I Read One Of Them. That Was Enough.

I will read later, whenever I stop crying.

[karlrschneider]

7. I posted about this earlier...nobody replied.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=516386&mesg_id=516386

[uppityperson]

8. sometimes timing is off by a minute or 2.

frustrating when that happens. Thanks to you too for posting it.

[riderinthestorm]

9. That's cause we like Taverner better!

:evilgrin:

(heh. just kidding!)

[shaniqua6392]

12. Thank you for posting it earlier!

I was off to my daughter's piano lesson and missed it. It sure sounds heartbreaking. I will have to pick up the issue. My subscription just ended two weeks ago and I was not sure if I should renew. I guess if they are beginning to shed light on the truth about Iraq, I will renew and let them know that this issue was the reason. Maybe that will prompt them to continue to shed light on things.

[patrice]

10. Their lives will not be wasted as long as we don't forget.

This war does not need to be prolonged in order to avoid "wasting" these lives. Whenever someone brings this issue up, we should say whatever happens in Washington or Iraq these lives will not be wasted becasue WE will NEVER forget. We are the ones who determine the value of our lives, not Washington.

[Bigmack]

18. I mean to be gentle about this...

but those live are wasted. Those people are gone for no purpose in this world. My friends who died in Vietnam died for nothing. And beyond their immediate families.... and us ... they are forgotten.

Another few years, and they'll be a footnote... "That's a picture of some guy in our family that was killed in one of those wars."

And the wounded? Right now, the news is full of brave young people working hard to overcome their awful wounds. The news cameras will go away in a few years, and the maimed will just be old amputees or old brain-injury patients struggling to make their lives.

My one hope when this war began was that people would remember that 58,000 of us died for nothing, and hold back their support.

Not to be.

I wouldn't read those stories in Newsweek for a million dollars. I knew those same kids back in the late '60s, and it took me years to learn to live with the depression and sense of rage. I don't need back again.

[karlrschneider]

19. I think we're just saying there are too many Americans who did NOT experience that,

as you and I did and perhaps need a dose of reality. You spoke a hard truth.

[Kingshakabobo]

27. Truer words were never spoken. But hey, at least now you can take a nice....

......vacation in Viet Nam. I hear they have Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's.

The thing that strikes me most about the movie "The Fog of War" is when McNamara describes his meeting with his "opposite number" from the Viet Nam war. The man tells him how futile and stupid our "domino principal" was and that they would never allowed Soviet or Chinese control of their land - they have been fighting 'those people' for a 1000 years.

58,000 dead for what?

[Cabcere]

11. Oh man...

Just hearing about this secondhand is ripping my heart out. :cry: My friend arranged to send his mom flowers for Valentine's Day...which ended up being the day he died. :cry: Thoughtful to the very end, he was, and I'm sure there are so many more like him. It breaks my heart. :cry:

[zalinda]

13. I read your post and my eyes starting tearing up

I'd be a basket case if I read Newsweek.

zalinda

[CrazyOrangeCat]

14. my god.

[shaniqua6392]

15. I am so sorry about your friend.

There are many of us out here whose hearts just break when we hear this kind of stuff. What a tragedy.

[AnnInLa]

16. Read what Anna Quindlen says on the last page:

"The rationale for going to war has to meet many tests, but if one of them, perhaps the most important one -- is whether the mission is strong enough to carry the weight of so many ghosts and so much misery, here and in Iraq, too. The grieving spouses raising children alone, the broken parents who wake each morning to a gray day. The amputees swinging down the street on prosthetics, the addicts who still hear IEDs exploding in their heads. The legacy of what-ifs, of abbreviated and amended lives.

Maybe any conflict will topple under such a burden. Maybe the spectacle of hometown kids' leaving home to be killed or maimed is bearable only when it's given a more antiseptic name: troop strength, casualties, something less human. That most macho of American novelists, Ernest Hemingway, reflects that in "A Farewell to Arms" when an Italian soldier talks about how sick he is of the whole thing. "There is nothing worse than war" he says, adding, "What is defeat? You go home....One side must stop fighting. Why don't we stop fighting?"

[Johnny Appleseed]

17. I rarely cry...

It had been a couple years ago at a funeral(for a young afghan vet none the less) since I had last cried. But today after reading several of those pieces I cried. The ones towards the end, the hand written "last letters" are especially poignant.

[AwakeAtLast]

20. My husband won't let me read his

Just like 11Bravo - he was those guys.

[niallmac]

21. Letters From Leningrad. Same old shit different day.

We had better learn to de glorify war one day or war will
de glorify all of us.

[RB TexLa]

22. skimmed a bit and put it to the side here

[Morgana LaFey]

23. And guess who brought this up on daytime TV today?

Rosie O'Donnell.

I LOVE that woman. I couldn't stand The View before, but now I am a loyal fan. She livens it up plenty, but more than that she IS the liberal media. LOL. All by herself.

She raised this issue in conversation and the guest host (Howard Stern's fiancee) read one of the letters. POWERFUL STUFF. Rosie had her little rant about "good for Newsweek, it's about time the media' brought home what this war is really all about. "I grew up during Vietnam" and "that's what made me an activist."

She was -- and is -- terrific. I LOVE her.

[ecstatic]

29. I admire the way she speaks her mind nt

[ptolle]

24. excellent

Juxtapose this excellent post and its subject with the current little tempest in that high school in Connecticut where the principal won't let students perform their self-composed drama based on the same sort of material.The wingnutters frequently accuse folk like us of hatred. I'm tempted to tell them its actually contempt and a sort of full on sickness at what they and those like them have done to this country.

[Hissyspit]

25. Cover: "any day I'm here could be the day I die"

[habitual]

26. link here

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17773294/site/newsweek/

[Marie26]

28. I understand

Just seeing the "roll call" of fallen soldiers on Newshour makes me cry; I'd be a basket case reading these letters. But I'm so, so glad that Newsweek is publishing these letters, so people will see these soldiers not as anonymous "troop casualties", but individual human beings with love, dreams, fears and courage.

[windbreeze]

34. This is exactly why, we haven't been able to see caskets returned....

the idea is to keep it all very impersonal...as though these men and women don't mean a thing...as long as we can't see the caskets, their deaths aren't a fact....good on newsweek...about damned time, someone gives these fallen soldiers a voice...
wb

[windbreeze]

delete this post...arrghhh

sorry about that...is there a delete button somewhere that I am not finding???

[windbreeze]

35. deleted.

this thing hung up, said I had a bug..then posted it 3 times...sorry everyone...for chewing my cabbage thrice

[ecstatic]

30. The IWR & Bush Co's actions were and still are criminal

The crime of the century. I can't help but think that Bush enablers are also criminal. And to think, we're all watching as he ramps up this next war with Iran.

[Ishoutandscream2]

31. "Why does Newsweek hate America?"

:sarcasm:

[Taverner]

36. Glen Beck was saying something of the like the other day

Saying Newsweek is "twisting the words of the fallen soldiers"

Um, how is printing something verbatim, twisting their words?

[Johnny Appleseed]

37. I hate Glen Beck with a passion...

he must have a powerful relative in the radio biz or something because the guy has less, way less skill than even someone like Hannity or Ingraham. I can't listen to his ignorance for even a few moments without cringing.

[Taverner]

38. Yes, at least Hannity comes acros as somewhat personable

I actually met Hannity once...for such an asshole he can be real charming in person.

[Leopolds Ghost]

32. "The Iraq War is indisputably a curious thing"

No matter where one stands on the decision to invade or on the conduct of the conflict over the last four years, the Iraq War is indisputably a curious thing. For the first time in the experience of any living American, we have sent an all-volunteer force overseas to advance our interests for a prolonged period, and virtually nothing has been asked of the vast majority of those who do not have loved ones in the line of fire. The bargain is hardly fair. If we take the president at his word, the men and women of the armed forces are fighting and dying over there so that you and I will not have to face mortal danger over here.

The administration may be right about this; it is impossible to know now. As wrong as the White House has been about the premise of the war (the presence of weapons of mass destruction) and about the way we would be received (as "liberators," in Vice President Dick Cheney's formulation) and about the conduct of the conflict once Saddam fell (we were unprepared for the sectarian bloodbath), history moves according to its own rhythms, not according to news cycles or presidential terms. Despite the depressing state of play on the ground, things may yet turn out better than most Americans suspect—or fear.

The families who co-operated with NEWSWEEK did not do so to make unified political statements; their views are as divergent as the broad public's. "It's not an issue of being antiwar or pro-war, anti-Bush or pro-Bush," says Larry Page, whose son Rex died in action. "The real issue is that our young people are there, and they need and deserve our support. My son said to me in one of his phone calls from Iraq: 'Dad, we've taken the fight to them. If we don't fight them here, we will fight them on the streets of America. They proved that at 9/11. We don't want IEDs and suicide bombers on the streets of America.' My son and 3,000 others bravely gave their lives so that you and I could live in liberty and freedom." That is one view; there are, to say the least, others.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17773294/site/newsweek/

[Leopolds Ghost]

33. "The war is going well, then it is not. The mission makes sense, then it does not."

The result is a window on Iraq we have not had before: the bravery, the fear and the chaos of war, and the loves and hates and dreams and nightmares of the warriors. Things are incredibly busy, then they are not. The Iraqis are welcoming, then they are not. The war is going well, then it is not. The mission makes sense, then it does not. Here is Mundell, in late August 2006: "This will be short, as time is very short, as usual.

"The happenings of late: we continue to get mortared, with an occasional RPG shot at us thrown in for fun ... A little girl was killed yesterday in a cross fire between our Iraqis, the Marines and the bad guys. Sad.

"Folks, I am very tired. We seem to be doing little, the city is mostly trash, rubble and AIF , and frankly I am tired of being a walking bull's-eye for anyone with an AK and nothing better to do, which includes most of the populace, apparently. We have found three IEDs before they could explode under our trucks.

"Sorry this isn't funny or upbeat—there is nothing funny or upbeat to talk about right now. People are dying like flies here and I am sick of it."