Tomas Young is a veteran in a wheel chair. He was shot in the spine by a sniper in Iraq. His story was featured in Phil Donahue's film, "Body of War," the story of Young's conversion from soldier to anti-Iraq war activist. You can see Young and others in the slides taken back stage at the Lollapalooza concert in Chicago, 2007.
This is a tribute to Tomas Young by Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam:
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Revere, I wouldnt send another troop into the area and that I can bet we agree upon. I wonder if this kid would have been shot if we had just unfettered our war machine and have done with this?
If you are going to go to war, go to war to win it.
Keep the collaterals to a minimum and if it means taking out a village or town to achieve the objective then so be it. But no more "peacekeeping", no more "police actions" on the US part. We have the weps now to kill on a six to one ratio and from standoff capabilities. Reach out and touch someone if you have to, but do it with the impugnity it deserves. It doesnt matter how you kill someone, there is no Shock and Awe. You are just dead.
The Frog in the Boiling Water scenario is where we are now. We are lslowly osing the country over Iraq/Afghanistan, green bullshit, GW and above the runaway spending.
Time for a paradigm shift. Get them out of there Obama. The ROE, and YES I have read them prevents them from defending themselves pretty much. Not to mention taking any aggressive actions.
The idea behind wars is to achieve objectives and impose the will (whatever that is) onto the recipients of your attack. This kid wasnt part of the scheme. Shot in the spine for WHAT? Peacekeeping, oil, economics, terrorism, regional stability? Oh, you can bet we could just take a kid and spreadsheet him with why he got shot. Both sides of the aisle. Murtha would say it was because we were murdering innocent people, Pelosi would just give that putz "whatever" look and then spend another trillion...Good for the economy.
For starts its not murder, the second is that those innocent people that do finally get the bullet in the back get it there because they ran out of ammo and are heading for more.
The reason Blackwater and other organizations exist is because under our ROE we cant even shoot our weapons. Its not politically correct.
Time to bring them home. If there are attacks launched at us from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq then we simply need to level them off. Flat, glazed earth if necessary. A bone strike or a cruise missile every couple of days someplace complete with camera view should be more than enough. If we arent there all we need is intel to guide our missiles in.
But then, we will still have someone saying that they were just innocent people doing nothing... except carrying AK's. That is of course on the way to the poppie fields.
Here is our next problem... The drug use and possibly abuse and its your boy Tomas from above:
Struggling to sit upright, Tomas began forcing his thin, angular body as far forward and backward as he could. "Here I am wanting a conversation," he said, "and it's not working for me. I'm feeling kind of dizzy and thinking it must be the meds." Tomas recalled that the night before he'd taken a prescribed dose of Valium, along with his regimen of pain pills, antianxiety pills, antispasmodic pills and laxatives, only to awaken earlier than usual. At that time he took his morning dosages of morphine and Wellbutrin, and a half-dozen other drugs, before falling back to sleep. When Brie woke to remind him to take his morning pills, he forgot, in the confusion from a troubled sleep, that he already had. He'd "doubled up." Then again, maybe he hadn't."
Sounds so much like the ideas behind Vietnam to me for the whole spiel.
The why of this kid getting shot was that someone didnt fear the US of A any longer. Same for 9/11. The fear of what we could do is large, the knowledge of what we wont do is even bigger.
Now that would be why?