Perspective

I think I have been pretty good (not perfect) over the course of this deployment, about not putting too much of any one political ideology into my posts. This has been a conscious decision on my part. However, today while I was reading the following AP article on the MSNBC homepage I found my anger welling up over the continued situations that our allied forces are finding themselves in. You can read the article in full here but I have posted an excerpt from it below:

Meanwhile, dozens of Iraqi policemen demonstrated in front of their Baghdad station Sunday, accusing U.S. forces of treating them like “animals” and “slaves.”

The protest took place at Rashad station in Baghdad’s eastern neighborhood of Mashtal.

Officers chanted “No, no to America! Get out occupiers!” while U.S. troops in two humvees and a Bradley fighting vehicle watched from a distance.

My anger came as I got to the last half of the final sentence of this excerpt, knowing that U.S. and coalition forces alike are meeting these sentiments on a daily basis. I think it important to note that these sentiments are often in some way, shape or form, shared by many war opponents in the U.S. and in other countries who have men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not pretend to know or understand what the troops are facing in these two countries. Unlike others, I will not pass judgment here over whether I believe "we" should still be involved. What I will say is that the men and women who are on the ground in these regions are not the policy makers; they are bound by rules passed down to them from their 'bosses' just like you and I are here at home. It is, I feel, incumbent upon us - no matter what our feelings are about these wars - to support these troops in any way that we can. I suspect that, if given the choice, many of those "U.S. troops in two humvees and a Bradley fighting vehicle [who] watched from a distance" would much rather be at home with their girlfriends, fiancé’s, wives, children, parents and friends. But they are not. I would suspect that many of those "U.S. troops in two humvees and a Bradley fighting vehicle [who] watched from a distance" do and see good and positive things on a daily basis that all of us at home are not privy to and that they are getting very little, if any, recognition for from the countries for whom they are trying to establish peace and order. I suspect that as they stood there hearing, not gratitude but contempt and scorn from the Iraqi policemen they've trained at their own peril, those "U.S. troops in two humvees and a Bradley fighting vehicle [who] watched from a distance" felt just a little more disheartened about their purpose in these countries.