This is the day we pretend we haven’t already dishonored them
Picture a high school senior watching the WTC towers fall in 2011. Horrified but soon resolute, he applies to West Point, and despite the competition, he gets in. He starts at the academy in fall of 2002. Four hard years later, he graduates and starts active service as a 2nd Lieutenant. It’s summer 2006, so it’s no surprise that he’s deployed to Iraq. Maybe he would have only spent a year or two there, but “the surge” began in 2007, so the army kept him in Iraq. Unlike some of his peers who were shifted to Afghanistan or elsewhere, he spends substantially all of his five years of required active duty in Iraq.
Now it’s 2011, and though he has three years in the reserves ahead of him, his required active duty is over. Ten years after 9/11 and having embarked on the most patriotic path he and most others could come up with at the time, he looks back and realizes: I have done nothing to defend or better this country in that decade.
He thinks: I helped attack and patrol a place that never hosted our enemies until we brought or created them there.
He reflects: I was paid to destroy abroad when I should have been building at home.
He allows himself a moment of pity, not undeservedly: I was among the best and brightest of my generation, selected for my desire and ability to serve; my country invested time and treasure to develop my skills; and yet all of that was wasted.
6 months ago • 0 notes