War in Afghanistan: The Unseen Sacrifice

Readers ask me how I find all the stories posted on Wounded Times. After all, it isn't as if they hear them reported on national news programs. The truth is, as the below article points out, it is the reporters in small communities around the country doing the best coverage of those who serve in the military. To them the war in Afghanistan is, just as Iraq was, an important story to cover. It is personal to them, the families they cover and their neighbors showing up to offer support.

I find the stories because for about 10 hours a day, I track the reports from across the country. Some come in emails. Some are done by searching news sources and some from friends sending me what they find. I do it out frustration more than anything else. When I did research, it was taking too long to find reports and then I noticed how many reports there were that never made it into national news coverage. I kept thinking all of these stories should be in one place to be easier to find. I was right. Soon reporters were calling me and asking about stories they read here.

Once in a while a story comes along that makes me think "this reporter gets it" because they leave very little out of what they write and their choice of words shows the story they are telling matters to them on a personal level. The rest of us just don't take the time.

If you want to read a wonderful testament, here it is.

War in Afghanistan: The Unseen Sacrifice
Huffington Post
James Wright
Posted: 12/13/2012

Near the end of Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln the president rides slowly across the battlefield at Petersburg. The cannons are stilled and the landscape is filled with the swollen and grotesque and tragic faces of the dead. This reminds Mr. Lincoln of the tragedy of war -- and contrasts sharply with the politics in Washington, just a few miles away.

This is a reminder that we all need to remember the costs in our current war in Afghanistan. I do not mean the financial cost -- although these are considerable. More importantly, we need to confront those costs that have been even more hidden than the future bills for these deficit-financed wars. Wars mean service and sacrifice and the costs of young lives. Our recent wars have been more than a few miles away -- and as a result much easier to ignore.

So far this year 302 Americans servicemen and women have died in Afghanistan, 2,166 since the war began over 11 years ago. There have been 17,674 wounded. Plus countless others bearing silent wounds. Each of them freely volunteered and went to war on our behalf. They served and sacrificed out of a sense of patriotic duty. Now their families and friends and comrades grieve as they try to impose some sense on it all.

For the rest of us, the war is abstract and distant. Fewer journalists and photographers cover its details any longer and even fewer politicians publicly discuss its reality. Anonymous sacrifice in unseen wars is not healthy for a democracy.
read more here

President Lincoln's words

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

What too many in this country seem to miss is the fact the men and women joining the military have no malice in them. They are not out to kill the enemies as much as they are determined to defeat them. Should the Afghan militants lay down their weapons and seek peace, no one would be happier than the men and women we sent over there. They do not want to leave a nation in chaos especially when so many have paid the price with their bodies, minds and lives.

If you run into someone saying "they shouldn't be there in the first place" as if that excuses their inability to care about them, remind them of why the men and women serve in the military in the first place. They are not risking their lives to kill but to fight the battles this nation decides must be fought. They do it for each other and the rest of us.