You Should, Too

You Should, Too
By Missy Comley Beattie

The sign in the yard isn’t large, though its message is:

Support The Troops

They Want Victory

You Should, Too

Each time I travel to Kentucky to visit family, I deliberately check to see if these words that pack such a wallop are still displayed in front of a house that stands near my running path. At night, when I’m trying to go to sleep, I think of each line and wonder about the person or persons who placed something this significant on their lawn.

Support The Troops. What exactly does this mean? Those of us opposed to US imperialism and the savagery of war are demanding military and mercenary withdrawal from AfPak-Iraq. We want the troops home with their families and friends, receiving the counseling they need after multiple deployments have branded their hearts and minds with images that will remain in their days and nights for the rest of their lives.

Supporting the troops means helping their spouses and children cope not just with the trauma of absence and excruciating anxiety but, also, with preparing the families for the return of someone who may be unlike the person who left. How could any war participant come home unchanged?

Supporting the troops means acknowledging the signs and symptoms associated with suicide and implementing programs of prevention. Military officials predict that the number of deaths in 2009 associated with self-inflicted wounds will exceed active-duty troop suicides (140) in 2008. Eighteen veterans commit suicide each day.

With these figures in mind, I think of the next line: They Want Victory. And I imagine only catastrophe, because no one wins in war—not our troops, their families, or our country. War is a calamity, the defeat of humanity. War is a choice. War is not just the opposite of peace; it is the opposite of life and of hope. Ultimately, even the war profiteers lose because, despite their power, they condemn their children and grandchildren to an unstable world.

You Should, Too, the last line on the sign, is a clarion call. Soon, President Obama will announce his Afghanistan strategy, one arriving eight years into a war that never should have been fought just as the one in Iraq never should have been waged. Add Pakistan, Predator and Reaper incinerations, and support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, all criminal acts conceived through nationalism, revenge, greed, and lies, and ask yourself if you advocate the persistence of violence in your name.

You Should, Too—question what is being asked of our military and their families and consider the horrors that continue against the people whose lives and countries we ravage with weapons once unimaginable and brutality that is unconscionable.