When People Die

I am a person who, unfortunately and fortunately, has experienced death from all sides. I know that statement might be hard to wrap your mind around but I believe that all people should and must strive to do so. I have a deep understanding of what it is to live with having taken human life and I have a deep understanding of what it is to lose life. To lose your own and the lives of others in the many different and varied ways. I share this because I believe it is important that you understand that I know intimately of that which I write here.

The experience and aftermath of taking a human life is not something you can ever communicate to another person. It simply isn’t humanly possible to express such and event. Even though the laws of man say you are not guilty of a crime for which you should be punished and societal tradition says you have in fact done something to be proud of, you still cannot ever, ever shed the guilt that your soul must carry and that is pain one cannot share.

The lose of a loved one is also something that cannot be communicated to another person. It is something that can only be truly understood when experienced and even then can not be truly shared. And even within that larger group that has experienced such lose there are subgroups of those who have lost their loved ones, friends, and acquaintances through violence, accidents, suicide, and natural death. Even these groups cannot share the different types and levels of grief, deep pain, anxiety, and anger they experience after such an event.

And then there is ones own death. This, for those who have gone to the edge and returned, cannot ever be communicated to another living soul. We can all share the anxiety of looking at our own demise but to have actually been to the edge and returned is not something one can share. It is an experience that changes the very soul of the person and it is a profoundly personal change.

Now you may ask why I am posting this diary on a political blog site. The answer is this. War is the perfect storm of death and all the varied experiences of death. Soldiers may and often do experience all that I have written above in a single day in war. They take life and loose friends and family through violence, accident, suicide and natural causes within the span of months, weeks, days, hours, or minutes and sometimes experience their own death as a cruel bonus while living the horror of war. A very miniscule few come back from the pull of death mostly broken and maimed, but those are the miniscule few.

These experiences that I have expressed above are happening every bloody second of every bloody day in Iraq. I write about this because when soldiers have to experience these things for all the right reasons it is bad…..very, very, very bad, but when they experience it for all the wrong reasons it becomes evil….very, very, very evil.

The American experience in Iraq is evil. It is evil because the American people were lied to, misled, and deceived into an unnecessary illegal preemptive war and subsequent insurgency and civil war by those who were and are charged with, and constitutionally responsible for, showing the light of truth and defending the constitution of the United States. It is evil because each and every day the perfect storm of death flows over the Iraqi countryside taking lives that should not be taken for reasons that are not reasons. The brave, the innocent and the guilty share death equally. They share an equal death that is promulgated by those who know nothing of death. Those who have no understanding of service to country and the ultimate sacrifice that may well be asked, because they have always shirked their duty when called and never struggled to defend the democracy they so enjoy. It is not necessary to list the violations of laws and the constitution that have been put upon the American people by this administration leading up to the war with Iraq, executing the war with Iraq and occupying Iraq because I believe that any rational, thinking human being capable of speaking, hearing, seeing and reading should know all of these things by now.

When people die it is because their leaders have failed. That is simple truth.

Those Are The Sergeant Majors Thoughts On That.