My father is a Navy Submarine veteran, a former Fed and is now working to help save the lives of young American soldiers in Iraq by doing whatever it is that he is doing. I think it involves counter-insurgency work and IED investigations. I don’t know anything.
My brother is former Army Reserve and was in Iraq for the first year of Gulf War 2.
When I was younger, the concept of a U.S. at war was hard to imagine. I had been born after Vietnam and was just a pimply adolescent during Gulf War 1.
We truly do live in a different time, now. We have young men and women out there in shitty deserts and nasty mountain terrains. They are in airplanes and on aircraft carriers. They are in frightening places most of us can’t even imagine.
Thank all of you for doing what most of us don’t have the balls to do. Seriously.