THE SADNESS OF MOSUL

Something about the weirdness of what happened reminds me of Vietnam—a bunch of people sitting down to eat, talking about life, laughing about life, then caboom--death! That’s what war is like, isn’t it?

What happened yesterday reminded me of 30 something years ago when our Brigade Chaplain was called from our LZ to the airbase in the rear at Chu Lai when a plane full of soldiers had died. A C-130 crashed on take-off. It was flying the guys down to Cam Rhan Bay where they were heading home.

I remember how weird it was, thinking that the guys had survived a year in the field and then when it was time for them to go home, they died. I remember how sad we all felt.

That’s the way war is—things rarely happen as we think they are supposed to. Once again, watching the news, hearing the news about these people getting killed while they sat down to eat, saddens me. I know that everybody that’s been in a war feels the same as I do. War sucks plain and simple but things like this make it seem even more sad, even worse.

What happened in Mosul reminds me once again how stupid it was that we got into this mess in the first place. As bad as Saddam was I’ll bet that the parents or the wives or husbands of anybody that got killed in Mosul will have second thoughts about this war.

The War in Iraq reminds me a lot of Vietnam now. I recall how much I hated President Johnson and McNamara and Kissinger and all those insane people who kept the war going while my friends and I watched people die. I wonder if some of the soldiers in Iraq don’t feel the same about the people in power now.

The way I feel today is: This war sucks now just as much as Vietnam sucked then.