The 9/11 Wars: A Survivor

Last month, on a Tuesday in the second week of our vacation in New Hampshire, we had gone out for a walk and sightseeing in the picturesque lake town of Meredith.  On the edge of its main thoroughfare, we waited at a crosswalk that would take us to Town Docks where tourists regularly line up for great lobster rolls.



The undaunted courage of our American soldiers

 returning home manifests itself as much on an ordinary

 sidewalk, as it did in foreign fields of fire.

Cars had stopped to let us by, and one of them was honking for us to get on with it, but I was too preoccupied with observing the young man and woman walking away from us.  I would have only a moment to snap a telephoto shot of the American hero which you see in the accompanying image. 

I don’t know which of our three wars he fought in.  Nor do I know how many tours of duty he may have served on behalf of America.  But it seemed from his age and injury that it must have been Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan.  Which one of those military theaters of operation was the cause of his missing limb, I wondered?

I was gratified to see him walking down that sidewalk with as much grace and balance as anyone else fortunate to have both legs intact:  yet I couldn’t help but wonder how he is doing mentally and financially.  Does he have any nightmares from residual PTSD?  Was he able to get a job? 

There are too many unanswered questions and, for me, the pervasive, nagging ones:  Why him?  Why did we send him over there?  Why anybody?  Why so long?

I’m not a Pollyanna.  After 9/11, we had the need to go to Afghanistan to clean out the rats’ nests.  But we stayed too long and we tried to be too nice.  We hamstrung our troops with unreasonable rules of engagement.  Then we punished them when the enemy demanded.  That’s not the way to conduct warfare. 

On 9/11/2012, America will pause to commemorate the victims and survivors of the World Trade Center attacks; we will honor the memory of our dead warriors and of the wounded; we will also confirm our support for those still fighting for what, to most American civilians, has now become an invisible war.

Concurrently, our purported Afghanistan allies whom we are training to defend their own country have turned on us by assassinating American soldiers in a most despicable way.

Time to come home.

(Click on the image for an enhanced view.)