This is a strange goddam thing.
Click here to view the embedded video.
My son was in the Iraq War. In 2009 his mother co-wrote this terrible song about him, and it’s on YouTube.
I found it more or less by accident, and, as regular readers know, I was not happy to have Dick Cheney’s knife at my son’s throat, nor was I happier when it was revealed that the reasons for invading a sovereign nation (half-a-world away that bore no immediate threat to the USA) were manufactured, or, to be extremely charitable, the result of wishful, magical thinking. I have never belabored the point, nor are your sentiments — supportive or snarky — solicited or desired (that’s a hint, pilgrim).
But here is the strange “kicker” to the whole strange interlude that began on 9-11-2001, less than two weeks after my son entered college on an ROTC scholarship.
Via friends in and out of the Army, I was able to track him, fitfully, and I DID know that he’d been sent to Iraq. But it was a month to month thing, and I could only watch helplessly, as parents all over America did. Waiting for news. Waiting to know whether your child was OK, was dead, was wounded — as the song says “Never knew there was worse things than dyin’.”
And now, this song appears via YouTube, and I present it to you as a footnote, as the Arne Saknussemm mark* that the passage was real and not merely the fantasies of some blogger somewhere, looking for a rhetorical trope to bash the War Criminals of the Bush Administration who ordered this disastrous enterprise. This TRILLION DOLLAR disastrous enterprise. (Did I mention that we hanged Nazis in the Nuremberg trials for the crime of “Wars of Aggression”? Didn’t? Must have slipped my mind, just as it’s conveniently slipped everyone else’s mind.)
[* Descend, bold traveler, into the crater of Snæfellsjökull, which the shadow of Scartaris touches (lit: tastes) before the Kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth; which I have done. Arne Saknussemm — Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth.)
I suppress the urge to say “Well, at least you got a small taste of what it’s like to have your child literally torn from your arms.”
He’s Coming Back
www.youtube.com
True story from the life of a mother of an Army Captain in the Iraq war. Music & Lyrics by Steve Schalchlin. Lyrics by Avril Roy-Smith. Performed by Steve Sc…
My son made it back from Iraq OK.
Courage.
The Democratic Daily
As I noted here last night, the White House hosted a blues show last night that was being taped for broadcast on PBS, Monday February 27.