Veterans Begin to See that Friends Died in a Fool's Errand

I for one always opposed the Iraq War.  First and foremost because the U.S. went to war on  the basis of deliberate lies formulated and disseminated by the evil Bush/Cheney regime, lies that a diligent press could have and should have totally exposed had it not for the most part acted as a lap dog to Bush/Cheney.  My second reason for opposing the war was because no one seemed willing to face the question of what would happen once the Hussein regime was overthrown.  Short of a permanent U.S. occupation, nothing was going to keep the country from ultimately blowing apart - something we are seeing take place before our eyes currently.  With a son-in-law who did three tours in the Middle East and who suffered sever wounds on his last tour, I can understand the feeling of veterans who are saddened if not distraught to see  Iraq spiraling out of control.  They lost friends and loved ones and often spilled some of their own blood in a war that should never have been waged.  I can only hope that if they feel anger that the anger will be directed at the right target: Bush/Cheney and the rubber stamp GOP controlled Congress that set this disaster in play.  More importantly, they need to realize that the failed GOP policies continue and that if they want justice, they need to throw Republicans out of office everywhere.  Better yet, they could start demanding that Bush, Cheney and others be put on trial for war crimes.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the ongoing disaster and the frayed emotions of many veterans:

A few weeks before their battalion was to get new mine-resistant vehicles, Capt. Adam P. Snyder, Pvt. Dewayne L. White and Sgt. Eric J. Hernandez were speeding toward a mission in Baiji, Iraq, when a roadside bomb engulfed their Humvee in flames, killing the two enlisted men. Captain Snyder, 26, died the next day, Dec. 5, 2007.

Matthew Adkins, then a self-described “butterbar” lieutenant, regarded the captain as a mentor, and his death leveled him. Hearing this week that Baiji was on the brink of being overrun by Sunni militants, he immediately thought of Captain Snyder, phoned his girlfriend, and cried.

“You think about those costs that can never be recouped,” Mr. Adkins said in an interview from Talkeetna, Alaska, where he works as a field manager for pipeline surveys. “I remember driving those Humvees to Balad Air Base to get our new MRAPs, and thinking if we had these things two weeks ago, they’d still be alive.”

About 800 American troops lost their lives, and many more were wounded, in those territories, the homeland of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist loyalists. For the comrades of those fallen troops, the grim news this week has left them struggling to reconcile the sacrifices that were made with the speed and magnitude with which northern Iraq is falling to insurgents.

For these soldiers, it brought the same wrenching dismay to the Army that Marines felt when Falluja fell to insurgents in January. But there is also a clear sense among many that this is different, and worse: Iraq could still be a functioning state after rebels seized parts of Anbar Province, but the capture of so many northern cities has imperiled everything the military once thought it might have accomplished.

Phillips McWilliams, a platoon leader now studying for the bar in Columbia, S.C.,  . . . . had predicted the eventual implosion of Iraq, his parents reminded him recently. And he always had doubts about whether the Iraqi forces they were training could ever secure the country after American forces left. But he is still struggling to reconcile the developments of the past few days.

“Part of me wants to say that everything we did or attempted to do is being torn asunder, that it is all for naught,” he said. “But I’m certainly very proud of what we did; I just don’t know how I feel yet. I’m very conflicted. I just don’t know what is going to happen, but it doesn’t look good.”

Mr. Sykes is now several years out of alcohol addiction and PTSD treatments he entered after a breakdown following a 2010 trip to Fort Pierce, Fla., where Captain Snyder is buried beneath a marble obelisk. “I drank myself into oblivion, and basically lost it” after the visit, Mr. Sykes said.

He is better now, married, and working as a policy aide on Capitol Hill. It was a hard road back, especially because he now considers the occupation of Iraq “one giant boondoggle.”

“Some guys just let it become all-consuming and they can never get past it, and their lives become one big rehashing of the same things,” said Mr. Sykes, who talks to Captain Snyder’s mother regularly. “You have to acknowledge it and not fill up with hate, or your anger will consume you.”

Sitting at his office in Alaska after a long day visiting crews, Mr. Adkins said he hoped the Iraqi government could claw back some of what it lost this week, otherwise “all that human capital spent on it was possibly for nothing.”

“That’s what I’m holding onto right now,” he said.

We need to NEVER forget that every American who died was as good as murdered by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.  If we forget this reality and fail to hold these foul men accountable for what they did, America is one step closer to another Iraq like disaster.