To all who have bravely served our country, THANK YOU!
To every person in our country who’s lost someone they love in these wars, my heartfelt prayers and gratitude are with you.
Now, it’s time to end this madness…Time to bring our people home!
~The red dust and dirt of Vietnam clings to my life as it did to my dad’s combat boots on the field. No matter how I have tried to wipe myself clean of my heritage of war, I find the tiniest particles of Vietnam in cracks and crevices I didn’t know I had. I cannot think of one way my dad’s experience in Nam didn’t shape my life or world view. Now in my 30’s, after years of trying to be something other than that damned war, I realize I cannot be anything else. I am the continuation of my dad’s experience, unfinished in its unfairness. As a kid, I knew intimately the terms PTSD and Agent Orange and Napalm. Borrowed nightmares crept into my room regularly. Because I lived things too heavy for a child, I was never understood, called too sensitive by adults who couldn’t handle one day in my house. My mom and I were the only ones on our team, fighting the ongoing battle to keep my dad sane and alive. He is..for the most part. As much as one can be after backpacking through hell. My mom’s hell and mine were of the same origin, but under the same roof we suffered alone. Only those in the family of war understand that. Finding other DOVV’s has given me a wider view of myself. I no longer question my own sanity or think of myself as defective for having the intense feelings I’ve carried all my life. I’m simply a DOVV.
~I am an orphan of Vietnam. My father, Lieutenant T. R. R., Jr. of the Third Marine Division, was killed on February 8, 1968 at Khe Sanh, during the Tet Offensive. I was born 3 months later, on April 29, 1968.
I consider Vietnam to be the defining feature of my life. Had it not been for that unjust war, I would have grown up with a father and a happy mother. Had she not been widowed, my childhood would have been very different; I cannot imagine it would have been worse (that’s a lie: I can imagine T R coming home with PTSD and providing me an even MORE fucked up childhood than the one I had — but I choose NOT to imagine it that way). It ought not surprise anyone that I have an extreme sensitivity to needless war.
~Growing up in the shadow of the war has a huge effect on you, as we all know, and I started to think that there were tragically few out there who knew what this thing is all about. I was thinking about the “burden” of carrying on the legacy of the lessons from their nightmare over there; about the psychological effects of being raised by PTSD and all that accompanies it; I was wondering why I’ve heard and read little to nothing about growing up with all that, given the mountains of research, poetry, etc there is on, say, children of Holocaust survivors.
~My Dad was in the Australian Armed Forces- Lance-Corporal, B Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment
I am the daughter of a Vietnam Veteran. He served from 1969 to 1970 for about 13 months. It is only in the last 2 years that my father and I have reconnected again. As a child, I remember a man that would become withdrawn, drank too much and who had massive mood swings. We left when I was 15. It is only now I realize the PTSD that he was diagnosed with about 8 years ago, has been evident for many years- he just denied it.
~Daughters of Vietnam Veterans~
~As Wars’ Death Toll Passes 5,000, Military Families Urge President Obama to Bring All Our Troops Home Now
Nationwide – As the nation awaits confirmation from the Pentagon of the 5,000th death of a U.S. service member in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Military Families Speak Out are mourning the dead and calling on President Obama to honor the sacrifices of these service members and their families and honor all of those who serve by acting swiftly to end both wars.
Warren Henthorn of Choctaw, OK, the father of Army Spc. Jeffrey Henthorn who died in Iraq on Feb 8, 2005, says:
“Way too many have died on all sides of these wars. If I remember correctly, President Obama won the Democratic nomination based on the promise to end the war in Iraq. But, between Iraq and Afghanistan, at the end of this year we will actually have more troops in harm’s way then we did at the height of the ’surge.’ That’s just as bad as we had it under President Bush. These wars now belong to President Obama. The blood is on his hands.”
Henthorn is a member of Gold Star Families Speak Out, a national chapter of Military Families Speak Out whose members’ loved ones died a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
~God Star Families Against The War~
~Veterans For Peace Statement for Armistice/Veterans’ Day 2009
Veterans’ Day began as “Armistice” Day, to celebrate November 11, 1918 when the guns of World War One finally stopped – and what cause for celebration there was!
From August 1914 until November 1918, 30 million soldiers were killed or wounded and another 7 million were taken captive. Never before had people witnessed such industrialized slaughter. A hint of the wreckage can be glimpsed by visiting a Great War memorial in any European town and invariably seeing a list of names long enough to include every young man who lived there at the time – hence the “lost generation.”
Today we can hardly imagine the horror of the trenches where rats provided a real service by eating away at the corpses hanging on the barbed wire, in shell holes and half-buried in the walls of the dugouts.
The reality of the battlefield permeated the consciousness back home; so much so that even in America, whose troops arrived in Europe only in the closing months of the war, Congress responded to a universal hope that such a war would never happen again. It passed a resolution calling for “exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding…inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.” Later, Congress added that November 11 was to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world peace.”
Armistice Day was more than a time for department store midnight madness sales. It meant more than military color guards marching in parades featuring the cleaned-up machinery of war. It was a reminder of the insane, horrific cost of war paid by soldiers at the front, those who ministered to the dead and wounded, and their families back home. It was a day to reflect on that memory and vow to learn to live in a world without war.
These days, when some still give all, but very few give some, it’s easy for most of us to go on with our lives of work, shopping and family as if that’s all there was. It’s easy to overlook the tremendous pain and pressures caused by the multiple deployments needed for a “volunteer” military – unless someone in your family is directly involved in the fighting or is cut down by war’s wide blade of “collateral damage” that can strike an Army base in Texas as well as a village in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Some truths are indeed universal. Veterans For Peace abides by two very simple ones: Wars are easy to start and hard to stop; and the innocent on all sides always suffer most.
The doughboys of WWI, shivering in the soggy, rotten trenches of Europe in November 1918, would have nodded wearily in agreement.
~Mike Ferner, President
Veterans For Peace~
Hey! Stop that… Put him down right now… Y’all don’t mke me come out there.
