Musings of an Old Man

Whatever this used to be about, it is now about my dying. I'll keep it up as long as I can and as much as I want to.

Name:
Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States

I'm a 69 years old white, male, 6'1", 290 lbs., partially balding in the back. I was married for ten years and fathered two children, a daughter and a son. My current marriage (2nd) will celebrate its 39th anniversary November 4. The date will be in the news because it was the same day as the Iranian hostages were taken at the US Embassy in Tehran. (Obviously, I had a better day than they did.) I'm a Vietnam Veteran ('71-'72). I have worked as a Computer Programmer, Project Manager, Graduate Teaching Associate, Technical Writer, and Web Developer. I own, with my wife, a house and a dog.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

An Open Letter to Cindy Sheehan

Dear Mrs. Sheehan,

I am a Vietnam Veteran, and I feel the pain you feel at the loss of your son in Iraq. I feel the hurt and confusion. I feel the anger at a life that seems to have been senselessly wasted by an unfeeling government.

It's hard to understand how this could have happened to your son. It's hard to understand how our leaders were misled--either by bad intelligence or by their own preconceptions--into this mess that has become the war in Iraq. It's hard to understand what good can come out of this war now, as all of its pretenses are stripped away by facts on the ground.

Your son's war seems to me to be a lot like my own war in Vietnam. The population in country seems at best indifferent to our presence and aid and at worst hostile. In such a situation it is hard to separate friend from foe. And it's hard for us back here to make sense of it all. So we mourn, we cry, we rage, and we plead. And nothing seems to matter.

No, ma'am, I do not know the pain of losing a son to war, this one or any other. My son is safely here suffering only the hazards of normal life in America and so far navigating them safely. But I have seen pain like yours on dozens of faces over the years, and there truly are no words I can offer that will ease that pain. Nor should I, or anyone else, try. It is supposed to hurt when a loved one dies. It is supposed to hurt when a son or daughter dies. That is part of our living.

I pray to God for your comforting, strength, and spiritual healing at this time. And I pray that God does not allow the troops to come home from Iraq too soon. I fear that to do that will make your son's death as meaningless as the deaths of 58,000 or my brothers in Vietnam.

You see, Mrs. Sheehan, I believe that one of the reasons your son had to be in Iraq is that 30 years of US policy has emboldened others to believe that if they just hang in long enough they can defeat us, not with power but with persistence, not by delivering a knockout blow but by nibbling at our resolve until we leave in disgust, and leave a job half finished.

We bungled our way through Vietnam for a dozen or so years and then left with a black eye and a bloody nose but hardly defeated physically as much as we were defeated spiritually. And in Lebanon under President Reagan we took a hit to the solar plexus when over 200 Marines were killed by a suicide truck bomb, and we pulled out giving the terrorists a victory by default. We did it again in Somalia after the "Blackhawk Down" incident. And the "war" in Bosnia was viewed by our enemies as a joke.

They say now that America is to mentally weak to stay the course. They say we can stand to shed anybodies blood but our own, that we lack the national will to see a conflict to the end. And if we pull out of Iraq prematurely, we will have confirmed that belief once more in their eyes.

I did not fully support this war when we started it. I felt that at best our government acted with undue haste against a dubious threat for reasons they never fully made clear to us. Subsequent events and finding since March 19, 2003 have more than justified my early concern. Iraq had no WMD worthy of the name, no WMD program, and no realistic hopes of restarting the one we tore down after the first Gulf War. In my view, our current administration was at best incompetent and at worst criminally negligent.

Regrettably, when the 2004 election came around, my view was in the minority. And though now the polls indicate the majority of Americans are suffering from a kind of "buyer's remorse" at their choice of a President who cannot admit mistakes or fix the things he has broken, he will remain President, God willing, until his term ends. We're stuck with him just as we're stuck with this war, Mrs. Sheehan.

We must vow that your son's death not be in vain, ma'am. And the only way I see to do that is to stay the course until we have hunted down the last of the terrorists and their leaders. We must see an end to this in which not only we declare victory but we are seen by our enemies to have won. For your son's sake and for the sake of all the fallen sons and daughters in this war, we must see it to the end. Otherwise, we risk even more of our sons and daughters against a foe who doesn't care who he kills or maims in pursuit of his desire for power.

It is not easy for me to say all of this to you, and I accept that you may not care to listen. Your pain is great, as is your obvious love for your son. In his name and for his honor, accept that this war must proceed to a conclusion and that we must prevail. It is now our only hope.

Respectfully,
Tom Murrell
Vietnam Veteran, 1971-72

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