50-years ago or a few months after I started this Blog, I wrote about getting casualty fatigue, the inability to decently process the daily death counts in the Middle East. As digits, each and every one of these tragedies was increasily losing any punch, any relevance to me. It was just a number. I even knew where to locate that number, every morning in my newspaper. I knew it because they had become numbers.
I've written about this before but I'm the second of three sons of a horribly wounded WWII Canadian soldier. He can thank the Lord it never affected his looks nor his wit. He came back from that war, from all of the devestation to live a wonderful and full life, actually, a life of some modest privilege.
Yet, as I approach my 60th year, I can still vividly recall being a young kid and wondering if your Dad, your provider, was really going to be there next month. I recall the ambulances running this, the most critical person in your life, off to hospital. I remember the waiting to hear - through a familial chain-of-command - just how my Dad was doing.
That's the reason I oppose "the mission" to Afghanistan. Any decent, intelligent human being with even the slightest interest in military history should be asking how a continual succession of "superior forces" from Alexander the Great, to two British Armies, to the Soviets has come unglued. Why, with our vastly smaller force than any before, will we prevail over these fundamentalist tribesmen? Why and then how?
If we can't answer "how" with any measure of certainty we can't even begin to answer "why" and then we are wasting Canadian lives on a cause we're not prepared to win. C'mon, there are kids out there who are expecting a lot better of us. We can't be backing these kids into a corner created entirely of our indecision. We're not going to have to live with this, they are. On this one, we've really got to try.
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