Archives for 2004

Lex shares his Memorial Day Speech that his church asked him to give later today:

There are all kinds of heroes. There are firefighters and police officers, oncology nurses and schoolteachers, and they should all have their own day of recognition, but it is not this day. Today we remember that all that we have, our freedoms, our lives, this wonderful country which was brought forth in sacrifice and renewed in toil and trial we owe to such as who would, if we ask them, spend their lives in its defense. We must honor and remember them. And we must also those they fought beside – by whose side they breathed their last and for whom they fought and died, in surrogate for the countrymen that sent them there. We must never, in a fit of pique or passion, allow those words to escape our lips that, “I support our troops, but…”

There was no “but” in their faith with us. No escape clauses, no qualifications.

A somber occasion then, this Memorial Day, but also a sadly joyous one. For if we must regret the bitterness and pain of sacrifice, we must celebrate the fact that there are those who love us enough, and trust us enough, and what we stand for, that they would lay down their lives for us. We must earn this.

We must earn this by remembering them and honoring their sacrifice.

We must earn this by keeping faith with their brothers and sisters who return from the fight, the broken and the whole.

We must earn this by keeping in our hearts their loved ones, for whom no Memorial Day celebration will ever be required to invoke their memories or sufficient to fill the holes left in their lives.

We must earn this by continuing to build that more perfect union, so that it may more nearly represent the ideals of truth and freedom and justice for which they gave their lives.

We must earn this.

Yesterday, the 3rd United States Infantry, also known as the “Old Guard”, placed a Flag of the United States before more than 260,000 graves at Arlington National Cemetery.

Why?

Because these men and women gave their all – in some cases their lives – so that you and I could live here in peace and freedom.

Freedom is not free.

Brigadier General Vincent Brooks – the public face of CentCom during Operation Iraqi Freedom has a new job:

Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks, Deputy Director for War on
Terrorism, J-5, The Joint Staff, Washington, DC to Deputy Chief of Public Affairs,
Office of the Secretary of the Army, Washington, DC. Brigadier General Brooks was
previously announced for Assistant Division Commander, 3d Infantry Division
(Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Read about it at at DefenseLink.

In today’s New York Times, Bob Herbert writes about Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia.

Herbert writes about how SSGT Mejia served six harrowing months in Iraq, went home to Miami on a furlough last October, and then refused to return to his unit when the furlough ended.

And he then goes on to say:

Sergeant Mejia told me in a long telephone interview this week that he had qualms about the war from the beginning but he followed his orders and went to Iraq in April 2003. He led an infantry squad and saw plenty of action. But the more he thought about the war — including the slaughter of Iraqi civilians, the mistreatment of prisoners (which he personally witnessed), the killing of children, the cruel deaths of American G.I.’s (some of whom are the targets of bounty hunters in search of a reported $2,000 per head), the ineptitude of inexperienced, glory-hunting military officers who at times are needlessly putting U.S. troops in even greater danger, and the growing rage among coalition troops against all Iraqis (known derisively as “hajis,” the way the Vietnamese were known as “gooks”) — the more he thought about these things, the more he felt that this war could not be justified, and that he could no longer be part of it.

Mind you, SSGT Mejia volunteered for the National Guard, and has apparently remained there long enough to reach the rank of Staff Sergeant. He’s identified later in this column as a squad leader and thus he has a significant amount of responsibility for the lives of his men. And because he decided the war was unjustified, he refused to return.

He let down his men.

Herbert attempts to cast this as an entirely different issue as he writes about SSGT Mejia’s defense:

Sergeant Mejia’s legal defense is complex (among other things, he is seeking conscientious objector status), but his essential point is that war is too terrible to be waged willy-nilly, that there must always be an ethically or morally sound reason for opening the spigots to such horror. And he believes that threshold was never met in Iraq.

And then at the end of the column:

A military court will decide whether Sergeant Mejia, who served honorably while he was in Iraq, is a deserter or a conscientious objector or something in between. But the issues he has raised deserve a close reading by the nation as a whole, which is finally beginning to emerge from the fog of deliberate misrepresentations created by Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. about this war.

The truth is the antidote to that crowd. Whatever the outcome of Sergeant Mejia’s court-martial, he has made a contribution to the truth about Iraq.

The reality is that this man swore and oath – he had an obligation to the service, to his country, but most importantly to the men in the squad that he led. And instead he chose to throw all of that away.

The real issue here isn’t that SSGT Mejia has made a statement about the war – but rather that he let down his men and violated his oath.

And for that, SSGT Mejia was convicted this week.