Penning Thoughts

As you read this, think for a moment: your nation is committing war, where hundreds kill and die in your name…right now and into this night. There is bravado, there is fear, and, I suspect, some doubt about why our nation’s flag and its tanks and planes and bombs are rolling the roads and roaring in the sky above a Middle Eastern desert.

Not many weeks ago we heard a similar screaming, ear-pounding cry over our heads, here in Arlington, as the new Air Force Memorial was dedicated near the Pentagon. Because the Air Force Thunderbirds were shooting hundreds of miles per hour overhead, their cries turned heads for miles around.

For a split second, if you’d not read the papers or had forgotten the announcement, you might have thought, “What was that!”, perhaps wondering if, in this age of White House-induced fear, we might be under some sort of attack.

Is it possible to imagine armored personnel carriers rolling down Arlington Boulevard, helicopters chopping the air, and rifle carrying soldiers walking the streets and posted at check points near, say, Glebe Road and George Mason? And that, as those planes careened through the air, muffled ‘booms,’ puffs of smoke could be seen in their wake?

Small countries and guerilla bands could never muster that kind of power….but, emerging powers such as China, and a recently rightward-drifting Japan, can bring shudders to our seemingly peaceful lives.

If we are not immune, why did we seek this war? Why did we stir up greater, worldwide hatred toward our beloved country?

Has our silence aided and abetted our elected leaders to continue forcing young men and women to stop their lives and carry armaments overseas, putting their families at great risk of losing the centers of their existence?

Now, weeks after the nerve-rattling spectacle of Air Force might, we hear talk of ‘pulling back’ or ‘pulling out,’ “as soon as they are ready to defend themselves.” You even hear the word “Iraqification” of the war, through which the reins of warfare are turned to those who live there.

If you’re in your late 50s or 60s, that word conjures up “Vietnamization,” the term then-President Nixon used as part of his ‘secret plan’ to end the war. That plan helped him win election in 1968. Yet seven more long years, and thousands of Vietnam Wall names later, it all came to a whimpering end as the last helicopter lifted the last evacuees from the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

As I’ve heard others say, how many Gold Star mothers will be told of heartbreaking loss, while those who started this madness ‘wind down’ our presence in a nation we have destroyed? Now that we know the end is coming, how many widows, how many orphans will be created in these final months ahead?

It has been said before, but is worth saying again, How do we ask another soldier to be the last one to die for a mistake?

Because, at this point, Arlington is being opened for more and more graves, in defense of what?… one man’s refusal to admit the obvious? His pitiful and outrageous attempt to ‘save face,’ as more die, and our nation becomes ever more a target in response to what he has sown.

We can pray for peace, and ask our members of Congress to bring us quickly to that end.

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Nick Penning is an Arlington freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.