I was cruising soldier's Live Journals this morning and an entry caught my eye:
" `This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. I don't...this hasn't happened much in the history of the world. We're an army going out to set other men free. This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land -- there's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other.' BG (of Volunteers) Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 1863"
So I wrote to him and asked what he and his fellow soldiers (enlisted, not officer mouth pieces) are fighting for. I was surprised by the replies:
"I put it in bold for a reason."
"What we were/are fighting for and what we were/are deployed for are two different things in their entirety. Sadly, what we are dying for and what we were/are deployed for are wholly united in a sick shotgun matrimony of lies. To quote Black Hawk Down: `Once that first bullet goes by your head [or that first IED blows up] politics and all that other shit go straight out the window.' The mindset of those on/and were on the `frontlines' (there is no frontline in Iraq, just a shifting current of `shit' with estuaries and tide pools of constantly stagnant `shit', is the same mindset of the American public: we love it, hate it, analyze it, ignore it, let it eat our minds and hearts alive, let it harden us, let it soften us, etc."
So contrary to all the photo op speeches the President likes to give in front of military audiences, apparently the U.S. soldier in Iraq is fighting for the U.S. soldier in Iraq.
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