“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”

So how long do soldiers have to wait before they get a little R and R?  To me, it seems like it would help moral so much more if they would let the soldiers get out and live a little.

Now I know some of the barracks are basically like a gated community, with workout facilities and video games and Internet cafes, but really, they are still stuck in the middle of a war with physical, psychological, and emotional strains at all times, even when they sleep.

I was reading Since You Went Away, a book of World War II letters from American women to their husbands/lovers/fiancées, and I took me a couple hours to figure out that they only got to see their significant other twice or three times in the matter of two or three years, sometimes more.  Wouldn’t that make things very very difficult? 

Hell, I’ve been in relationships where I only got to see the girl once a week, and that was stressful enough.  So I wondered, is it the same thing today?  Do they only exchange letters and e-mails, have a couple videoconferences, and maybe one weekend to go somewhere not filled with war and stress?

I go to my trustworthy, typical American soldier, the Usual Suspect.  (Suspect, in case you are reading this, I am being sarcastic.  You are the shit, and far from ordinary.)  But seriously, I truly wonder how many times they can escape the world they live in, and not only in dealing with relationships. 

In all of the letters in Since You Went Away the letters all have a reoccurring theme of struggling with the fact that the soldier is actually gone, and will not be coming home anytime soon.  It’s a shame we don’t have the soldiers letters to read, because then I could understand if they get more of a break.

Suspect just recently went to Tokyo, and from what I can tell by this entries, had a damn good time.  This paragraph in an entry called “Insomnia”, really grabbed my attention when glazing over his articles:

The realization that this is all temporary, it haunts me once in a while.  I want to hold on to this as long as I can.  We’ve got a clean slate, even if it’s a different color than everyone else’s proverbial slate.  We’re finding something out, but we don’t know what.  This isn’t just R&R from Iraq, its R&R from my entire life.  Just picking up and leaving for somewhere where I don’t know anyone, I’ve probably needed this for years.*

How can a soldier truly enjoy themselves when they know they are not going to have something like this for a couple of years again?  The way the mind toys with you would be almost too much to handle. 

Suspect later talks about how he wanted to not get back on the plane to return to Iraq, how he would find a job and settle down and just blend in.  He says the only thing that held him back was knowing all of his friends were still doing their duty, and he will be damned if he didn’t finish it out with them.

So what is the connection I am trying to make?  Even though our technology has progressed SO MUCH, can we still not even allow our men and women overseas to at least get a little break from the world they live in?  I think that it may boost moral on the end of the troops, and it may make the people on the home front rest a little easier if they get to see their husbands/mothers/children/significant others more frequently. 

I know, it will cost a hella amount of money, and we can’t afford to let the troops go from Iraq very frequently, but I’m just saying.  I know the women who wrote the letters back in World War II would have appreciated it.  I KNOW people now would appreciate it.

Maybe it’s time to give something back to troops, and let them come home to visit family, if maybe just for a little while.  Do it in increments or something, I don’t know.  It just seems like the right thing to do.  But maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about and am crazy.  It seems like a good plan to me…

*The Usual Suspect

 Written 21 March 2008

            I feel sick.  Not like the 24-hour flu sick, or even the ‘I have to write 6 entries for my blog by next week’ sick.

This is the type of sick you feel when you get so angry you could scream, or the nasty feeling in the pit of your stomach when you know something is terribly wrong and you just want it to go away.

Islamic Army In Iraq

Now I guess that I should give a little warning.  Do not click on the link above if you are easily disturbed by raw war footage, and I would also not recommend it for those who have family or friends serving in the military.

For those of you who didn’t click the link, I will give a little background.  In our last class, Professor Rozema passed out a handout that talked about the freedom that soldiers have while blogging, and the relevance the Internet has to the war in Iraq.  In that article, it briefly mentioned this website, and it says that it takes a daily assessment on attacks on allied forces and it encourages others to follow in the path of Holy War, or Jihad. 

Being the curious scoundrel that I am, I decided that I wanted to check it out, see what it was.  I expected it to be a website that looked like it was made in a high school computer class with a couple of creepy pictures and perhaps a video or two of people shooting some rockets.  Man was I wrong…

The first thing that caught my eye was the running ticker on the top of the page.  It took me a minute to figure out what it was saying, because it sort of reminded me of the stock market scroll on the bottom of MSNBC.  The ticker was counting off the latest American casualties, and the latest bombings of hummers and other assorted military vehicles.  There were advertisements for someone called the “Baghdad Sniper”, who apparently ‘never misses’, and entire sections dedicated to military operations and filmed military operations.  They have media releases, political statements, and even a “Contact Us” option. 

So by now, I am outraged.  How could they do this?????  How could they show American men and women who try so damn hard just to do their job getting shot, blown up, and burned to death?  And to top it off, they celebrate it, and post it on the Internet for everyone to see….

I pause, and quickly flip open a new tab and go to Youtube. 

My anger turns to disgust as I witness American soldiers videotape themselves killing Iraqi insurgents who are wounded.  American allied soldiers, who represent freedom for all and international peace and unity.  The same America who gets pissed off when a video of Iraqi’s burning a dead American soldiers body surfaces on the Internet. 

I know I am most likely not supposed to be writing about this, I should be analyzing literature and how it relates to war today, but this is too important to me to let pass by.  I don’t want to say we are bringing this upon ourselves, because two wrongs don’t make a right, but what kind of an example are we setting for the Iraqi people?  Can’t they get the Internet too?  It isn’t called the WORLDWIDE WEB for nothing…

I think maybe we need to take a look in the mirror before we start policing the web for bad things that others do to us.  It is an utter shame to see what a state the human race has sunk to, if we exchange videos via web of one person killing another, especially when they are helpless and wounded. 

If you need further convincing, just click on the links below.  I can’t write about this anymore…..it’s too much….

*U.S. Soldiers Kill… 

*U.S. Soldiers waste… 

Written 04 March 2008.

In class we discussed the different ways that we can approach writing about war.  Novels, biographies, short stories, poems, almost every type of literary device in the world today can be used to bring forth the story of war and tragedy.  In class, we read the graphic novel “Maus”, which brought the discussion to asking whether or not a comic can be successfully used to depict such horrific acts.

Some argued yes, and others argued no.  It certainly made me think about World War II differently, and I could understand the arguments for both.  It made me curious however, to see if the Iraq war now had cartoonists depicting the Iraqi insurgents as snakes, and the allied forces ferrets…. or something. 

Nothing in my Google reader had anything to do with comics, so it was time to go searching the endless worldwide web.  After approximately 26ish minutes of searching, I came across something interesting.  TALES OF THE IRAQ WAR by LETUFF.  I couldn’t help but be sucked in by the endless supply of cartoon that Letuff has to offer.  However, I couldn’t help but notice right off the bat that these were all anti-war cartoons.  Some are very powerful.  Here is are a couple samples of some that he put out for the 5^th year anniversary of the war:

 Iraq War 5 Years A

Iraq War 5 Years B 

Now as moving and thought provoking as most of the 252 free cartoons he has are, this wasn’t quite what I really was looking for.  This cartoonist does not relate quite to “Maus”, but it did offer a unique perspective on another anti-war effort, trying to get his message heard from the world.

I went back to my searching through Google, and I stumbled across another comic writer.  This one, however, detailed more of a story line and less of a political statement.  This comic was written by Joe Sacco, who is a very famous comic book writer.  Sacco traveled to Iraq for a short period of time and wrote a comic about his time with the troops.  He calls it “Complacency Kills”, and I thought it was a very good representation of  our troops, and some of the struggles they have in a day to day living.  He depicts the Marines as very trim and athletic, quite the contradiction to Letuff’s comics. 

Some would argue with against this type of medium being used to tackle the monster of depicting war and tragedies, saying it trivializes the sacrifice people have made by making them ‘inhuman’, but I believe it has its benefits.  Growing up in a society where the babysitter can be replaced with a television says a lot about our culture, so perhaps the only way we can educate some children and adults in the future is through graphic novels. 

Read “Maus”, and “Complacency Kills”, and make your own decision about how best broach the topic of war and sacrifice.  I think they both do a damn good job.

“Complacency Kills”, by Joe Sacco

TALES OF THE IRAQ WAR by LETUFF