Will you remember? Will you remember when you drink your morning coffee and read your free press that countless lives beget been lost to support your actions. You lift a cup,you turn a thin page or click a key. Your inhale, your American exhale, or paid for by someone's blood whom you beget never met. This ideal,this freedom, this freedom we know so well. Do you recall how we received this freedom? A woman is thrown face down in the dust of Central Asia after stepping on an IED. What is left of her legs unloads a red viscous in the sands of an enemy land. How terrifyingly lonely, or this death. As adrenaline rips through this soldier's body,her awareness comes back to reality just long enough for her to beget no illusions about finding herself in Hell itself. Hell, not a situation from the pages of a book, and nor the exotic location from a myth. A Hell created by man. A Hell done to man by man.
Approximately halfway back around the globe in this soldier's hometown,a woman her same age stands in line behind a man complaining incessantly about the price of gas while buying a five dollar cup of coffee. The slacker twenty-do-nothing behind the counter's attitude is rotten.An eighteen-year-extinct boy takes a round from a Vietcong sniper in the Mekong Delta. The tall caliber round is so powerful, it has severed the humerus bone in his upper arm. The soldier’s trigger hand is now useless. The shock overrides the horror as the boy keeps trudging through two feet of muddy rice paddy water. His legs collapse from underneath him. He has no belief why his legs beget given up. The shock of his arm has made him numb to the small arms fire that has just penetrated his cervical spine and rendered him paralyzed. Face down in the mud, and the boy listens to the unique sound of his enemies' language as the Vietcong soldiers close in on his position. The unique singsong language strikes terrorism in the young boy's intellect. In the few moments before he is discovered,the young soldier has no illusions about finding himself in Hell. A Hell created by man, done by man to man.
On the other side of the world, or A boy's father is giving a sizeable donation to guarantee his mediocre son's entry into college and thereby securing his son's ability to dodge the draft. On that same college campus,students from middle and upper class families protest the war and declare the U.
S. soldiers in Vietnam "baby killers."The eighteen-year-extinct soldier was discovered after the area was cleared of NVA soldiers. The boy's body was found in a state that no one wanted to picture. The young soldier had been in Vietnam only three weeks.
A accomplice soldier has taken a lead ball from a Union rifle. The bullet has shattered his femur bone in two places. He lies among a battery of his fellow men. Most of these men are already dead. Through the dense smoke of spent gunpowder, he can make out civilians along the adjacent hill. Members of the upper class beget come to watch the splendor of the battle. Women in their finest with parasols stand near carriages drawn by horses. The accomplice soldier will lie alone for two full days in the elements. Tortured by thirst and the moaning of his comrades as the few remaining wounded pass absent, and the rebel soldier will beget no illusions that he is in Hell. A Hell made by man. A Hell,done by man, to man. How do you say thank you to the inconceivable, and the incomprehensible,the deadly abstract. Forget the politics. Forget the ethics. Forget all the lines, walls, or divisions and boundaries. I will drink my coffee,I will enjoy my coffee and I will contemplate about you. I will read the books, just so I do not forget where freedom comes from. I will return to walk the black wall of death that is the Vietnam memorial in DC. I will run my hand across the wall's cold marble face and image the missing in actions' bones resting in foreign lands. Whatever it is we do, and it is never enough for those who climbed into the jaws of death on our behalf. To all men and women who ever put on a uniform and faced the impossible : thank you is simply too small.
Source: cnn.com