Again, sorry if I have offended, and yes, they are brave, but they are still our children (“kids”) and I meant absolutely no disrespect or offense to anyone!
Not now, not EVER!
How about we “poll” them, then, Martin Hyde?
How do you think they would answer???
I believe you’re just being “contrary” because of where the OP wound up (GD), yes?
Relax and think about it: They are our children, no matter what their ages are, and they do NOT deserve to die in a war which cannot be won!
To the mods: I TRY my damndest to stay of here and the Pit, but sometimes I slip. Feel free to delete my posts if they don’t make sense and no hurt feelings!
Do you consider firefighters to be children? Police officers? Search and Rescue workers?
EVERYONE is someone’s child. When you reach adulthood, you have the right to be treated as a full citizen, responsible for your own actions and choices.
Referring to the military as ‘children’ is little more than a blatant appeal to emotion. It’s also demeaning to them. They are adults who made their own choices for their own reasons, and that should be respected.
BTW, my best friend joined the Canadian forces last year. He’s 44 years old. He volunteered specifically to go to Afghanistan. I doubt it he would enjoy being considered one of our country’s ‘kids’. He’s an officer in the military of my country, and deserves respect, not infantilization.
And that would be true if he was 24 instead of 44.
9-11 was planned in Falls Church Va., Paris, France, Sarasota, Fla., and Hamburg, Germany. It was carried out by Saudis with Saudi financing. There is some footage of people on monkeybars ,training to be soldiers in Afghanistan. They were not the same group of people. Afghanistan war is a huge waste of blood and treasure and it does not make us safer from terrorists.
(And I KNOW you know that the word “Bullshit” is not directed at YOU, dear friend! I just want it understood that our sons and daughters (“soldiers” - what - EVER) don’t need to be there fucking up their LIVES!
Jesus Christ!
I cannot believe we are disagreeing here because of fucking semantics!
Correct, we simply couldn’t ‘instantly’ remove them logistically. We can not rotate in enough MAC flights to get them out in a safe manner in what you would probably consider a reasonably short period of time.
See, it all comes down to being in a hostile environment. We can start pulling them back to a staging area, but as they get fewer, they will be attacked in transit to the base camp, and the base camp is a lovely concentration of targets. It would be a massive retreat under fire, essentially. Bluntly we can not pull out 40,000 people with the planes we have even if we could sustain a berlin airdrop time schedule without seriously pissing off the natives as we would have to agressively shoot anything that remotely threatens the perimeter. Can you imagine having constant flights of fighter craft, manning of a hard perimeter 7/24 for something on the order of 2 months? You can logistically manage only a certain number of people moving per hour. The russians managed because they could drive out in armored columns. We would be concentrating andmaking a nice target rich environment.
Our best bet, forlorn hope though it is, is to make peace in the country. THen we could simply rotate people out and replace them with local constabulary [which is what we were trying to accomplish]
I really really wish they would actually LOOK at Japan … we occupied them, gave them a rebuilt infrastructure better than what they had, and left them culturally intact [the Japanese government started westernizing them before ww1, we didn’t do it. All we did was force a democratic government] and religously intact. We really do have no intention of converting them to christianity, just stopping the whole terrorism thing [though I would personally like to see religious law superceeded with democracy and a lack of human rights violations and equal rights for women, but Im funny that way]
I hope I didn’t lead you into thinking I’m a vet. I’m not. I tried to sign up as a pilot in the Canadian Forces, and was turned away for poor vision. But I have had many friends in the forces, and I used to work in a flight school on a military base, and I have the utmost respect for the men and women who have chosen to serve their country in uniform.
Also, I think it’s wrong to politicize the shootings at Ft. Hood by tying them to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hasan is not a victim of post-traumatic stress. He’s never been deployed overseas. He looks to me like yet another crazed loser gunman taking out his frustrations on other people. Had he worked in a college, he might have gone on a rampage and shot students instead of soldiers.
And the problem is that no-one has really managed to hang onto it for long. Yes, the British subjugated Afghanistan, but that’s not quite the same thing as being able to assimilate it into their Empire and do anything productive with it.
The British were largely using Afghanistan as a “Buffer” against the Russians anyway, AIUI.
No-one is attacking you personally, OK Quasi? I know it’s a frustrating issue, especially when you feel passionately about it and other people don’t seem to share your passion.
If you’re looking for a good, humorous read on the sort of things that have historically happened in Afghanistan to foreign armies, check out George MacDonald Fraser’s book Flashman (sometimes entitled The Flashman Papers or The Flashman Papers, Vol. I. They’re very funny but also very educational too (Fraser was a soldier and a journalist-historian who did his research.)
I agree with this 100%. The reasons for joining the military are as diverse as the military itself, but one thing true across the board is it is a decision that someone who is no longer a child makes. Whether it’s a 44 year old man wanting to serve his country or a 17 year old ready to become an adult.
