This entry was posted on 10/23/2011 6:29 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
[Note: This blogpost is quite long, like a lengthy but juicy piece in Vanity Fair. I suggest you bookmark or favorite the piece, read what you can of it, then return when you have more time, unless you've plenty of time now. I guarantee it will be worth the trouble.]
"It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for the rage."
--Robert Frost
When President Obama announced that the "long war in Iraq will be coming to an end by the end of this year," he promised "another season of Homecomings," as all remaining deployed troops would be reunited with their families at some point during the holidays. That would include one of my nephews, who is currently back in-country for a second deployment. This bring to EIGHT, the total number of deployments for my family members to Iraq and Afghanistan--seven of them in Iraq. My son and three of his cousins have all served honorably in combat roles in the Marine Corps, Army, and Army Special Forces, with ranks ranging from Marine corporal to Army major--and that does not count one family member who also did a tour in Afghanistan in the very early months of the conflict, as a brigadier general with Army Special Forces, before he retired.
My son and one nephew--with five deployments between them--have now completed their four-year active-duty commitments to the Marines, as well as their four-year Reserves commitments, and are living busy civilian lives. My other two nephews are making the Army a career. My nephew Mike was deployed with the Marine 3/7 to the Anbar province in April, 2004, when Blackwater private contractors were attacked by a mob in Fallujah, beaten, shot, and set on fire, dragged through the city behind pickup trucks, and finally, hanged from the bridge that soon became known as the Blackwater bridge. His unit fought the insurgents in an attempt to regain control of the city, but took heavy casualties and were called back until the Powers that Be could plan a more coordinated attack and give innocent civilians time to flee the city before the push.
That major battle, the Battle of Fallujah, which took place in November of 2004, included my son in his first deployment with the Marine 3/5. He, his buddies, and thousands of Army and Marine troops were held outside the city for days until after the presidential elections, because President Bush knew there would be massive, bloody American casualties during that horrific battle, and he did not want to risk his chances of getting reelected by having so much bad war news smeared across the TV-news screens every night.
Three days after the elections, he ordered the attack, and my son, his buddies, and so many other sons and some daughters (mostly medical staff) fought block-by-block, street-by-street, house-by-house, and room-by-room for days, taking more casualties in that month than in any other month of the entire war--a bloody number that still stands, seven years later.
The November Battle of Fallujah, (known as the Second Battle of Fallujah by the Marines because of the April battle by my nephew's unit, the 3/7), was detailed in a compelling book, NO TRUE GLORY, a Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Bing West, a former Marine who humped it with 10,000 troops during those harrowing days, taking the reader from tense command posts to the chaos of battle. Tom Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post war correspondent and author of the seminal book, FIASCO, The American Military Adventure in Iraq, pronounced No True Glory, published in 2006, as the best book on the war in Iraq up to that time.
Truly, this battle, the largest one for Marines since Khe Sanh in Vietnam, dominated every newspaper and news magazine for weeks. We subscribed to Time and Newsweek here at home. When my son was deep in the thick of battle, the new Newsweek landed in our mailbox, depicting three Army soldiers in full combat gear on the cover with the words: The Slog of War: Why Fixing Iraq Will be Harder Than Bush or Kerry Told You--and inside, a two-page photo depicting Marines, with the title, Hell to Pay.
A couple of weeks later, Time arrived, with a close-up of a Marine yelling something to his buddies, and the words: Street Fight: Inside the Battle for Fallujah. Inside, a two-page photo spread of an army unit, and the title, Into the Hot Zone.
The first words of THAT article, by Michael Ware, were "WE'RE NOT GOING TO DIE!" as the platoon takes machine-gun fire.
Although I do come from a military family, there were many things that I did not yet understand while that horrendous battle was taking place in terms of military casualties. My son had explained to me that if the news media reported "soldiers" dead, that it was army. "Marines are always called Marines, never soldiers," he said.
You'd be surprised how much that simple designation helped over two deployments.
I knew that troops were prevented from contacting relatives for 24 hours following a death, in order to give the military time to notify the families. I did not know that, if the news blared that "nine Marines were killed in Fallujah today," it meant that the families had already been notified. Every time a Marine died in Fallujah, during both my son's deployments, I lived in a 24-hour Zone of Agony.
My biggest fear was that the Marines would not be able to find us. When I Google-earth my own address, I cannot tell where my house is on the topographical map. It is remote West Texas ranching country, and unless you've got a sprawling estate or ranch headquarters with several houses and barns, a solitary country house does not stand out, not even one with barns nearby. The instructions we have to give people who visit can be convoluted. I remember, when my nephew Michael was driving home to Dallas for his post-deployment leave from Camp Pendleton and planned to spend a night here--he and his buddies traveled 1100 miles, but had to pull over not two miles away because--for the first time--they were lost.
So this was not a neurotic concern for me--it was real. My worst nightmare was that I would get a phone call from a Marine sergeant who had driven a hundred miles from the airport in a rented car to notify us of our son's death, and had gotten lost, and I would have to give him directions to the house so that he could tell me what I had obviously already figured out. I could not get my city-type friends to understand why this was such a concern to me. They would laugh and say, "They're the Marines! They can find anyone!"
And I would explain how UPS and Fed-Ex were not able to find our house, even with GPS, and often had to phone for directions. Still, no one understood.
No one understood.
There is so much that people who are not living this heart-in-your-throat, I-can't-breathe daily nightmare do not understand.
They don't understand, for example, how you are utterly, completely, TERRIFIED every moment of every day your loved one is in a war zone--especially if he is part of a combat unit. (Women cannot, as yet, serve in combat units. This does not mean that women have not fought--and died--honorably in these wars, but when you refer to a combat or Infantry unit, you say "he.")
They don't understand how you can be pushing a cart down a grocery store aisle, spot a rack of beef jerky, and burst into tears.
They don't understand that you have to ship Christmas gifts in October.
They don't understand how, when you have a child in harm's way, you don't want to hear things like, "Well, at least we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here,"--when you are standing there KNOWING that they, themselves, not only never served, but their healthy kids did not, either. So you don't want to hear their fucking empty useless cliches.
And when it comes to Marines and army Infantry, they REALLY don't understand how it's not like the neat little news broadcasts that depict sprawling bases with Burger Kings, huge mess halls, and tidy air conditioned buildings housing, say, two soldiers at a time, with big banks of phones and computers (if they didn't bring their own laptops), so that they can e-mail or call home almost every day.
Even when not in combat, a Marine like my son and nephew is out on missions for up to three weeks at a time--10 days is average--sleeping in burnt-out buildings or around desert campfires, eating MREs for days on end, going without showers for two weeks or more, and once in a while, passing around a beat-up old SAT phone so that each Marine can call home for maybe two or five minutes--IF the satellite stays positioned long enough. Once every two weeks, they'd get to go spend 24 hours on one of those big bases--long enough for a couple hot meals, a shower, a good nights' sleep, and a 30-minute phone call home, which they would sometimes split with wife or girlfriend and parents.
Those lengthier phone calls were my only signal that we had 24 hours of time where we did not have to worry, because our son was alive and relatively safe. We would sleep better then, too.
People don't understand that you learn to love your son's buddies through the stories he's told, even if you have never met them, so that when one dies, you are as devastated as if you'd lost a family member, and you grieve.
People don't understand about the condolence letters. When a Marine dies from your child's unit, many of the other Marine's family members write condolence letters to his family, either a wife and kids or set of parents. You write these letters to someone you will likely never meet, and you try to think of something to say that is not a shallow, empty slogan like, "He died for his country," or "his death was noble"--you know, the stuff you'd hear the president say in his many photo-op speeches about war.
You'd write the letters while your own heart was not just grieving for that lost boy, but shredded with fear for your own, who was still in harm's way. You'd write the letters knowing that you could be the next one to receive condolence letters yourself.
Every morning I would go out back if the weather was nice, or in my living room, and do Yoga in an attempt to control my stress, but all through the workout, tears would stream down my face.
Some family members chose to deal with their son's deployment to battle by not watching any news or discussing anything about the war. But my reasoning was that, if I blanked out the war from my knowledge, then when he got home, he would be that much lonelier because he would know that he could not discuss with me the things that had happened to him. I wanted him to always feel that he could talk to me about whatever he needed to whenever he needed to do it, without being worried that he had to protect me from anything.
So I absorbed war news like a sponge--anything and everything I could get my hands on--newspaper and magazine articles, blogposts, books, TV broadcasts and documentaries. I discussed it at length with my brother-in-law, the general--impressing him, I think, with my knowledge. I found other Marine moms and dads I could gather with online, huddling over the computer or phone on bad days, seeking news of where the boys might be and what they might be doing.
My son knew that this was my way, but when he called home from war, we did not discuss the war very often, because that is not why a soldier or Marine calls home. They call home to hear funny stories about family and friends, or to hear news of pets or, if they have them, their children, or common, everyday LITTLE things from a world so very far from their own. They call home so that, for a few minutes, they can close their eyes, hear a warm, loving voice on the other end of the line, and be safe at home.
So, when I had to go see a cardiologist to see if something might be wrong, (because, as I pointed out earlier, I couldn't breathe--turns out it was just stress and fear, not heart trouble), we didn't tell our son. And when his granddad was hospitalized, we kept that from him too. There was nothing he could do about either of those worries, and he did not need the distractions. Thinking of other things can get a Marine killed.
So many things can get a Marine killed. Every day that he was not secure on-base, my son and nephews were getting shot at or blown up. When they were not doing that, they were going up in helicopters or driving in Humvees that were getting shot at or blown up.
Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.
The Mills family has had one family member or another in Iraq or Afghanistan virtually every year in the past ten--skipping a year now and then, for more war-training.
My son was in his final week of deployment in 2005, when his superiors seemed to find it necessary to inform the guys that his unit was being REdeployed, back to Iraq, seven or eight months after they got home from THIS deployment. They didn't even let the guys have the unmitigated joy of going home, because they knew the whole time that they would be going back. In the intervening months, what did they do? They trained for war out in the Mojave desert.
My son said that one night, camping in a tent in the Mojave during a training exercise, he had a terrible nightmare that the camp was being overrun by insurgents. He leapt to his feet and grabbed his rifle--but it was not loaded--then he flung open the tent flaps to find...the desert. It was disorienting, disturbing, and damnable, because they redeployed in January of 2006, back to Fallujah.
It doe not get any easier, these repeat deployments. Not for the troops and certainly not for the families. The old terrors return. You hug him tightly at the airport with your heart cracking wide open because you are so afraid that it will be the last time you ever see him. He reaches the top of the airport escalator on the way to security, and turns and gives you a big brave smile and a hearty wave, and you wave back, and then when he turns away, you burst into sobs, and you cannot stop crying for hours. For days, really.
Every time he calls home, you think it might be the last time you ever hear his voice.
Every time a Marine in his unit dies, you are frantic with grief and sorrow and terror. You struggle to write condolence letters even as you try and think what to say to him when he calls and even as you know there is NOTHING you can say, not to him, and not to his buddy's mama.
My son's second deployment was even worse than the first. "It wasn't a matter of IF someone would get blown up," he told me later, "or WHEN. It was a matter of WHO."
Every single day, they went out on patrol, and SOMEBODY got blown up or shot by snipers. My son loaded buddies onto Medevac helicopters missing limbs or bandaged up; he attended memorial services for those who were going home in body bags, telling me, "Our company commander," (that would be a young captain probably not yet out of his twenties), "would kiss them on the forehead, then zip 'em up and ship 'em home."
Then one day, it was my son's turn. The improvised explosive device hidden in the road blew up under the Humvee he was driving, tearing out part of the front end and sending him staggering to his knees. He was medevacced out of the combat zone, checked over in a base hospital, pronounced a rough-tough-real-stuff Marine, then flown back to his unit.
A couple of days later, a sniper shot Dustin's good buddy, Lance Corporal Rex Page, in the head as he ran up onto a roof, with Dustin two steps behind. Cpl. Page died soon after.
At some point...somewhere along the line...I lost my mind.
Just a little bit, mind you. Nobody had to commit me or anything, though I'm sure they wondered from time to time. I was able to function (barely). But the relentless stress, grief, fear, and worry drove me off of some mental ledge somewhere, and I went into freefall.
There aren't a whole lot of Marines in West Texas. They are a seagoing branch of the military, and all their bases are on coasts. So, there aren't a whole lot of fellow Marine families. And in a rural area 100 miles from a mall, there aren't ANY therapists around to listen to descriptions of your nightly nightmares and daily obsessions--not that they would have understood.
I know a Marine dad whose son served with mine who IS a psychologist, working at a clinic, and he said that even though his colleagues were all exceedingly kind, and all willing to help, "There is no one who could possibly understand what this is like," he told me, "unless they have been through it."
We decided, during one lengthy phone call while our sons were in a Very Bad Place, that obsessive thoughts, nightmares, insomnia, irritability, depression, hair-trigger temper, and catastrophizing were NORMAL behaviors for those with family members deployed to war.
He had just told me a tale of how, when his son's platoon was camped in an abandoned building, his son had gotten jolted awake from a sound sleep when the building came under heavy fire. He had had raced to the roof, clad only in boxer shorts, flip-flops, and his helmet, to engage the enemy.
It was a brave, foolish thing to do, but it is the kind of thing brave, foolish young men DO in war. We laughed, we two parents, because what else could we do? When you are terrified, that is one thing you do to keep from crying all the time--you laugh. And so we laughed.
In all those years--from 2002, when George W. Bush started talking up the Iraq war at fund-raisers, (who sells a war at fund-raisers unless, of course, they view that war as political; as the perfect campaign slogan) of all places--to 2011, when Barack Obama called an end to the madness--there was only one thing I could do.
I could write.
It is a terrible thing, to find that a war you oppose with every cell and fiber of your body and soul, could be the very instrument of the death of your own beloved child.
Dustin, like his nephew Mike and so many thousands of idealistic young people, enlisted following 9/11. Because Dustin was so close to college graduation, the Marines held a slot open for him and waited for him to complete his studies. The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon had shaken him deeply. (His uncle, the brigadier general, was working at the Pentagon that day, and one of his cousins was a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown in Washington, D.C., and had raced to help remove bodies from the burnt-out wreckage of the building, not knowing if his dad was among the number or not.)
Dustin wanted to step up, do his part to serve and protect this great nation. "I think I'd rather be one of the protectors," he told us, "than one of the ones who needs protecting."
He thought he would be chasing terrorists through the mountains of Afghanistan, not fighting insurgents in the streets of Fallujah.
I didn't think that the Taliban should be allowed a safe haven to continue to train terrorists in Afghanistan indefinitely, so military action in that country seemed sensible to me. I am not the kind of peace activist that is opposed to all wars, everywhere, for any reason whatsoever. Those who did not fight the Nazis, for example, were eventually taken over by them.
Sometimes ya gotta fight.
But Iraq was a whole other matter, and I was vehemently opposed to what I considered a war that was ill-conceived, ill-planned, and illegal. I was appalled at the haphazard way troops were flung into that conflict poorly armed and armored, with no exit strategy or end game in sight, chasing after ghosts based on nonexistent evidence made up out of whole cloth to be served up to the media swathed in the flag.
I deeply resented the strict media control, the wholesale co-opting of all news outlet by trading access for propaganda--I'll give you an interview with Dick Cheney if you write a friendly piece; but if you write anything we don't like, we'll cut off all access altogether, for the duration. Even the New York Times fell for it--a real coup for the liars in the White House.
I hated the way the war-dead were hidden from the public.
But more than anything else, what drove me wild was the cunning and deliberate way that anyone who dared speak out against any of Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney's plans were branded traitors, or at the very least, people who did not love their country, were not patriots, were not "true" Americans, and were worthy of nothing but scorn, derision, and mockery--not to mention full-on hatred.
When Max Cleland--MAX CLELAND--was driven from office by being portrayed as unAmerican, a man who'd left half his body in Vietnam, I was outraged beyond my ability to express. When people at the 2004 Republican convention sported mocking "Purple-Heart Band-Aids" and called into question John Kerry's heroic service, I was apoplectic.
At first, before we had access to high-speed Internet service, and our dial-up was so notoriously slow, I wrote journal entries, one of which I posted years later on my blog, about the night before our son deployed to war, called, "This is Why They Call It Leave."
I was tormented by my anti-war feelings when so many in my family were fighting in that same war. I was warned by just about every conservative on my e-mail list that even just THINKING those thoughts about the war in Iraq was hurting my son.
My son was a 26-year old grown-up. He knew how I felt about the war but he also knew that I loved and respected him and was deeply proud of him. He and his nephews were well acquainted with the weekly funny cards they got from me, along with Care packages and letters. They knew how I felt about things but for the most part, I kept my views to myself because when you get deployed to a war, you don't get much choice in the matter. There was nothing they could do about their tours in Iraq, so they didn't need any preaching from me. The closest I would ever come to mentioning politics was to say in a card that I was praying for them and then tease, "Let's see if God listens to the prayers of a Democrat."
But I fretted enough about it to track down the late, very great, Col. David Hackworth, or "Hack," as he was known, who was the most-decorated soldier of the Vietnam war and who worked tirelessly on behalf of soldiers and Marines in every war. Hack smelled a rat with the Iraq war, and was outraged when he heard Rumsfeld tell a poorly-armored soldier, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had."
I found Col. Hackworth and asked him, point-blank, if it was possible to "love the warrior but hate the war."
He told me ABSOLUTELY it was possible, and that furthermore, most of the soldiers and Marines he'd talked to hated the war also and wanted out. They could not speak about their feelings on the war while they were in uniform, without risking getting into trouble with the brass, so Hack became their voice until his untimely death from cancer just a few weeks after our e-mail exchange.
But that one e-mail gave me courage. Hack helped me see that you could do both: you could support your loved one in the fight, and you could fight to end it at the same time.
It gave me someplace to put the rage.
Last April, a series of wildfires came across our ranch property, burning up everything in sight except for our home, which was spared because my husband fought back the flames by hand. Sometimes, I think of the rage that swept over me during the worst of the war years as a fire that consumed me.
Many times, one person or another would say I was "obsessed" by the war--but NEVER, not ONCE, did anyone from a military family say that to me. We were ALL obsessed, because that is what war does to a family--it consumes it. Either a troop is deployed or training for the next deployment, or preparing to deploy soon, or coming down from a deployment.
The whole family deploys, in that sense. When you're not living in fear, you are living in dread.
And when you see the commander-in-chief and his minions spreading happy-talk about how great the war is going while, at the same time, seeing up-close, first-hand, what your loved one is going through that puts the LIE to the happy-talk claims...it DOES something to you.
Deep inside, on some fundamental, spiritual, soul-level, it CHANGES you.
There wasn't a lot I could do about it early on, but during my son's first deployment, my computer died. We had already cannibalized parts from other computers--three different times--and this time, it was DEAD. When my son found out about it, he called me from Iraq and said, "Mom, I'm going to buy you a computer with some of my combat pay when I get home. You wait until then. I want to get you something really nice." I sputtered and argued, of course, but he held firm. For the next four months, I used my husband's laptop when he was home, on an e-mail basis only.
We learned to go to gettyimages.com and look up our son's unit, down to the Lima Company designation, and then we could find war photographers who were embedded with 3/5 Lima. In this digital age, they would post dozens of photos every day as they moved with the unit through the streets of Fallujah. That gave us a bird's-eye view--for better or worse--of what our son was doing in Iraq. Every day we pored over the pictures, looking for a glimpse of him. Most of the time, we would think we'd found him, only to discover later that we were wrong.
I'd go to news sources, read what I could find, print them up, and put the articles in files for him to see later.
I sent Dustin three disposable cameras also, and he'd carry one around with him in his pants pocket. Whenever he could, he'd yank out the camera and take a snapshot. Weeks later, he'd wrap up the cameras in brown paper and send them home. I'd get them developed, keep one copy of prints, and send another to him. Some of his photos could have been printed in Time or Newsweek. I know, because sometimes, I'd be looking at almost identical prints--one in a newsmagazine, one in my hand.
Like the one of a building door upcoming--he was maybe three troops behind the one going in, and spray-painted in red on the side of the building were the words: DEAD BODY INSIDE, with a long arrow pointed at the doorway my son was about to enter.
The pictures were grim, sobering. He never sent home pictures of dead bodies or anything, but what he did send home was war at its rawest--the destruction, the suffering, the silliness. Before he came back, I bought a very fine leather photo album and had a brass plate made with his battalion, company, and platoon designation and the dates and place engraved on it, and presented it to him as a gift on his return. To this day, it is one of Dustin's most prized possessions, one he does not share readily with anyone but a select few.
In other words, you don't get to see those pictures unless you appreciate the seriousness of them. War is not a video game, or a movie, or a TV show, or a 3-minute newscast. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that displays mankind at his very worst and at his very best; and once you have beheld the reality of it, you are never again the same. Never. If you are not the sort of person to linger over the photos, asking him to explain what this is or who that is or to tell you the story behind each one, then you are not worthy of seeing them.
I've seen him show the scrapbook to one cousin, but not another, this friend but not that one. Only someone who has been through this either first-hand, or with a loved one, can possibly understand why that is.
When my brother-in-law was out for a visit, following his retirement from the Special Forces, and Dustin was still in the Marines but had left his special photo album at home, I showed it to the general. He lingered over each and every page, not saying anything, not asking anything. I knew that I didn't need to explain things to him, anyway.
Then, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, "These guys...They always did everything I ever asked them to."
He didn't mean the Marines, of course, but he meant ALL of them, all the men and women who fight in all the wars that generals send them to fight. My brother-in-law had commanded many fine young men like my son and his two, and we both knew that there are no politics when your heart is bursting with pride and worry for them.
Later that year, one of his two boys would be deployed to the deadly Diyala province as part of George W. Bush's so-called "surge." His son, a company commander for an army Stryker brigade at the time, would have to tell his men two weeks after they arrived in-country that their deployment had already been extended by three months. During the 15 months he was in Iraq, he lost many brave young men, a sorrowful fact he struggles with to this day.
Dustin's first deployment was an eye-opener of political manipulation versus reality. He and his buddies would stumble into the base mess hall after a typical two-week mission, filthy, dusty, bloody, and exhausted, and would stand dumbstruck, gazing up at the television tuned to Fox News, and hear all about how well the war was going that they had just been fighting.
"It was lies," he told me. "All lies. We had no business being in that country. They lied about why we had to go in, and I bought it. But there were no weapons of mass destruction. Nothing they had told us turned out to be true."
He came home consumed by his own rage, bought me a brand-new Hewlitt-Packard desktop computer with all the bells and whistles, and said, "I want you to use your gifts to speak out. I want you to do everything you can from your end to bring this war to an end. I don't want to die in Iraq, and I don't want any more of my buddies to die there."
I told him I was worried that, since I wrote under my own name, I might get him into trouble by protesting the war. He said, "You let me worry about that. I don't care what they do to me."
That spring, we finally got a satellite Internet connection, and I started blogging, first at Blue Inkblots, a free Blogspot site, and then at Deanie's Blue Inkblots, at a paid website.
Some of the blogposts were intensely personal, like this one from June of 2006: "3 a.m. Phone Calls Home from War: It's Not Just Politics." That was the night Dustin called clearly distraught, but uncommunicative. He just wanted to hear from home. I found out later that Rex had died that day.
In others, like this one from April of 2006: "Military Mutiny: 'I Will Never Trust Them Again'," I would rage, saying, "I am the mother of a Marine Corps fighting man, and I will call out my outrage, I will speak truth to power, I will be counted, I WILL NOT BE SILENT...I will be a word-warrior for the real warriors, I will fight for the fighters...until the politicians who pulled off the greatest scam in this country's military history are not only drummed out of office...but properly burn in hell."
With high-speed Internet I was able to read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the U.K. Guardian, the Military Times every day, as well as peruse major websites, some of which were just getting started, like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post. I came to know the best war correspondents by name--those who embedded with combat troops and risked their lives every day to bullet and bomb--and to watch for their articles, which I printed up and filed. I watched for their inevitable books and bought them as soon as they came out.
More than anything else, I was looking for something GOOD, something that would match the happy-talk, because I thought if I could find something good, some development that would make it all worthwhile, it would help me not be so afraid.
But there was nothing.
I would print up my posts and file them, putting the most recent posts in front of the last ones. In the end, I had file drawers full of printed up and torn-out articles from news publications, and 1,000 pages of blogposts on the war in Iraq.
One Thousand. Pages.
Sometimes my posts were tied to current events and recent developments. Sometimes I would compile a dozen or so articles on one particular subject regarding the war and post on that. Sometimes I would refute the happy-talk or some lies out of the administration or from the latest Right-wing viral e-mail with the TRUTH, backed by facts.
Sometimes, I would reference literature, as I did in what was possibly my best--certainly my most recirculated--blogpost, from May of 2007, "A Black Matter for the King That Led Them To It," in which I quoted Shakespeare's King Henry V, Act IV, Scene 1:
"But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place'--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poorly behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared there are few die well in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection."
In that piece, I talked about the reality of what troops must deal with when, say, a Humvee gets flipped and set on fire by a roadside bomb, saying, "For all the patriotic flag-waving and yellow-ribbon magneting, there is nothing particularly patriotic or romantic about death in combat."
I talked about the heavy price being paid by men and women "barely out of his or her teens."
I blogged about the use and abuse of troops, the "back-door draft," and other dirty tricks being played on them to force them to war when they did not want to go again and should not have had to, the arbitrary lengthening of deployments, the "Russian Roulette" those who sent them back and back and back again played with their lives and the terrible toll it takes on them.
I blogged about military families and the stress these policies had on them, the skyrocketing divorce rate, suicide rates, drug and alcohol abuse rates, child abuse rates, and post-deployment deaths by such means as motorcycle wrecks.
I blogged about how oblivious most of the American public was, how the United States was not at war--only 1% of Americans were actually at war. The rest had been mesmerized by video games, cable TV, and a commander-in-chief who basically wanted everyone to forget about the war unless he could use it as a campaign ad photo-op background.
I blogged about the outrageous, insensitive remarks made to the press by Right-wing politicians and their enablers, like the time Laura Bush had said, "No one has suffered more" over the Iraq war than she and W had. In the April 2007 post, "Oh,Give Me a F**king Break, Laura Bush," I reeled out the reality of maimed and disabled veterans trapped at Walter Reed, or family members taking care of their traumatic brain-injured soldier or Marine, or mothers staring empty-eyed as the tri-corner flag was placed in their arms at the funeral of their son or daughter.
I also took on the Left-Wing peace activists who seemed to have no compassion or even the slightest understanding of what it meant to serve in the military, as in two posts I wrote in April of 2007, "Let's All Blame the Troops for the Mess They're In," in which I explained WHY so many men and women enlist (to get help with their education--not because they think it would be fun to kill people), and "Just Because You're Born in This Country Doesn't Mean You Deserve It's Privileges," in which I talked about why military families are proud of their service, even if others don't understand.
I blogged about speaking out against the war, whether you were military or not, and how my blog had been blocked on military bases in Europe, but how, "They'll Have to Shut Me Down to Shut Me Up."
Over on TPM Cafe, with Talking Points Memo, I copied over my Blue Inkblots blogs and I also wrote just for them, things like, "Our Voices Have Been Lost," and "I Write."
My posts were always well-sourced, but they never left the personal. It was my aim to show that the POLITICAL can be PERSONAL, and how every vote counts.
In "Homecoming," which I did exclusively at TPM Cafe, I talked about the reality of post-deployment leaves, and how I once stood outside my son's bedroom door in the pre-dawn one morning and listened to him cry out in his sleep from nightmares, trying to decide whether it would be better to go in and wake him or leave him to his demons.
I talked about the poignant midnight right before he went back to Pendleton, when we sat out under the stars, and he told me heartbreaking things he had seen--the worst things. I remember how honored I felt, as if I'd been given a sacred trust. To this day, I have told no one what my son said to me that night, nor will I ever. I am so grateful that he felt secure enough that he could talk about it to me, and I will never betray that trust.
Years later, one of Dustin's Marine buddies told me that reading my blog, "It felt like you were my voice," he said. "Like you were speaking for me. You said things that I either couldn't say, or I didn't know HOW to say." He talked about the strength he'd drawn from the blogposts, how he'd forwarded them on to his family.
Nothing anyone has ever said to me about my work has ever meant more.
In my blog, when I wasn't talking to military families or on their behalf, I was taking on pundits and politicians. I raged and fought to get out the truth.
But through it all, I felt hopeless, powerless, helpless, driven nearly mad with frustration.
And then, for Christmas of 2006, my sister gave me a copy of The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama. Like everyone else with a thinking mind, I had been blown away by his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004. But as I read the book, I found myself underlining whole pages. Never in my life had I felt so in sync with a politician--I loved everything he said, whether it was about pragmatic politics and the necessity of compromise, or taking on sacred cows even in his own party, or the specifics of what he had in mind for education, health care, the environment, and so on--I would find myself with tears tracking slowly down my cheeks; that was how deeply affected I was by what I was reading.
I had known that he had spoken out against the Iraq war, all the way back in 2002, but I had never seen or read the speech in its entirety. So I looked it up, and what I read changed my life. I had printed up the speech, and I didn't even realize that I was underlining every line in it.
It was as if this man had crawled into my soul and was speaking with my voice.
By the time I got to the end, I was sobbing, face in hands, full-out breakdown time.
I well remembered the political climate of 2002, how anyone who dared to speak out against the Iraq war was destroyed politically. It had taken BALLS to do what he did. Guts I'd never seen in a politician.
I bought a copy of Dreams from My Father, and in the reading, came to know that this man had done the soul-work necessary to know himself well--something George W. Bush would never do.
I waited eagerly for Senator Obama to declare his candidacy, and when he did, I was one of the first few HUNDRED to sign up to donate money every single month to his presidential campaign--all the way back in February of 2007.
From that point on, I knew that the only way to REALLY have any hope whatsoever to bring the Iraq war to an end was to put this man in the White House. Other than the cartoon-character candidate, Ron Paul, NO ONE was talking about ending the Iraq war in early 2007.
At the time, Barack Obama was 30 points behind Hillary Clinton. Nobody took him seriously. She had been anointed queen and nobody cared about the skinny young upstart black guy from Chicago.
I did, though. I followed every speech and policy paper he did on everything from international relations to health care to education to the economy. I printed them up, read them, filed them. I paid particularly close attention to his speeches on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I can tell you now that, pulling those speeches out of the file folders, rereading them--HE HAS KEPT EVERY DAMN PROMISE HE MADE REGARDING BOTH WARS. If you don't believe it, then you weren't paying attention, or maybe you just heard what you wanted to hear, but he has done everything he said he would do, and he has done it in the time he said he would do it.
Although I continued to blog about the war and the returning troops and their problems, as well as things which affected them, such as the fight for the new G.I. Bill, I blogged tirelessly for Barack Obama, in Blue Inkblots, TPM Cafe, and on the Huffington Post as part of their "Off the Bus" program.
I stood in the rain down in Austin, Texas (five hours from here), for, oh, something like five hours, so I could be on the rope line after the candidate Obama gave his speech there. I was covering the event for HuffPo, but I did not go with the press up on stage, though I was invited. I wanted to be in the crowd, I wanted to feel their energy. When he came down off that stage, the crowd surged forth with such power that I wondered if I might get trampled.
Fighting to put Barack Obama in the White House was the most empowering thing I ever did. My whole family supported him
People loved to make fun about Obama's promise of HOPE. Oh, how they mocked and derided him--his opponents, from Hillary to Sarah, certainly, but also pundits and pontificators and even those in his own party who just didn't see it happening.
But I am here to tell you that it was not funny to ME. To this Marine mom, Barack Obama offered the first HOPE I'd had since the war began. I trusted him. I believed in him.
The night he was elected, my phone rang off the wall--husband, son, daughter, friends, people from all over the country called to say how wonderful it was, but I could not stop crying.
I cried for three days.
I'd be going about my housework, tears sliding down my cheeks. They were happy tears, to be sure, but they were real.
The FIRST DAY Obama was in office, he directed the Pentagon to come up with a plan that would withdraw 100,000 troops from Iraq in 16 months.
Pentagon generals, scornful of another Democratic president who had not served, and disconnected from the enlisted men and junior officers in the field who had supported their new commander-in-chief, thought they could push the new guy around. They leaked out documents to select press, with the distinct impression of stirring things up, making him look inept and inexperienced, like someone who needed to pay attention to his generals.
Perhaps they were also accustomed to his predecessor, who had big crushes on people like Gen. Petraeus, and who romped around them like a happy lap dog, giving them whatever they wanted since Rumsfeld had ignored them the first six years.
But they underestimated their new boss. In a show of respect, HE went to see THEM at the Pentagon, but once there, he made it clear: These were their orders, and they were to execute them, and he intended to see no more childish leaks in the media.
By the time 16 months had passed, the president had overseen the withdrawal of 100,000 troops from Iraq, including every single Marine.
At that time, he promised to withdraw the rest of the troops by the end of 2011.
The campaign to support Senator Barack Obama for a year and a half until his election, and every day since, was for me a watershed in my life. For years I had raged and raged, burning like a fire that was consuming every aspect of my life. I felt so trapped and hopeless and filled with frustration at what I saw the previous administration doing, not just to that country, but to the men and women who served our country with such pride and courage.
Time after time after time I saw the deployments of close family members into that hellhole, and endured their dangerous absences with daily prayers and an anvil on my chest.
I couldn't breathe.
In one of his speeches, the then-candidate Obama spoke about how one woman had approached him at an event and said that her nephew was deployed to Iraq and, "I can't breathe."
He said he thought of that woman every day.
It wasn't me, but it could have been, and just knowing that he was thinking about us all, and working to end this travesty brings tears to my eyes, still, to this day.
On Friday, President Obama announced that he would keep his promise, and he would bring home all the troops from Iraq, (including my nephew), before the end of the holiday season, and that soon, we would begin to draw down in Afghanistan, as well. As he said, "The tide of war is receding."
What this means for me is that I will continue to blog on behalf of the military and veterans as they transition to a peacetime nation and, for many, the challenges of civilian life.
And I will continue to fight, with every breath in my body, to see to it that President Barack Obama is reelected for a second term.
This man kept his word. He gave hope and peace of mind to a terrified, rage-filled Marine mom. He did it in a sensible, practical way that provides the best security to the retreating American troops as well as to the Iraqi people.
I'm not blogging as much as I once did, obviously. Facebook and Twitter enable me to do the same kind of networking in a more efficient manner. I'll keep doing it, though, as the campaign fight heats up, the rhetoric grows more inflamed, and sparks fly.
I'm very much aware that this blogpost is ridiculously overlong, that some of my readers had to bookmark or favorite it and read it in installments. This does not bother me.
This was a story I had to tell.
To my son, Dustin, and nephew Mike, semper fidelis, Marines. I thank God for every moment of every day you are safe and happy.
And to my two nephews who still serve and fight, God bless you and keep you. Aunt Deanie never forgets you or your sacrifices.
To those who have stayed with me, reading my blogposts over the years--particularly those who have also sent loved ones off to fight--I can never thank you enough for your support, your laughter, your tears, and your love. Some of you still have sons in the fight, some saw them safely out of the service. God bless them all, our brave warriors.
To those who served in an earlier time and who have read and supported my work, I thank you all for your service and your courage.
And to my husband and daughter, who suffered through the worst of my crazy-time but never once withdrew your support and love, you are my heart and soul.
We made it, didn't we?
