21
For every brave army in the field, there is an army of cowards back home. I’m the general in the field, and I’m calling this war over. We’re done and we’re coming home.
Deal with it.
We’ve been getting your dispatches and reading them carefully. Your words are encouraging and supportive. The letters and pictures are warm and thoughtful. But you don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on and so we’ve decided you are no longer in charge.
Remember the last war? We sure do. We lost a lot of good friends in that one. Some of them are still alive but too wounded to fight again. Others are physically healthy but traumatized from killing. For you, killing means success. But killing is a sickening business. That’s just one thing that you, the army of cowards, don’t understand.
Some of the people we’re fighting are crazy sons of bitches. They even engage in suicide attacks to kill us. They’re nuts. They think they’re going to heaven, that they’re doing God’s work. I gotta say, we may be brave but we find them to be downright scary.
But they’re not cowardly or ignorant. They know what they’re doing and they are putting their lives on the line. We hate them for their violence, but we respect them.
We’ve lost our respect for you. You are way too comfortable putting us at risk, and keeping yourself far from the flying bullets. You even hide the images of our sacrifice, supposedly to protect our dignity. But we’re not stupid. We know the real reason. War isn’t glory, it’s simply gory. Cowards are afraid to even look.
The troops here with me, they’re my brothers and sisters. Many of them are excited about the war. They believe they are doing important work. They are fighting the enemy way out here so we won’t have to fight them at home.
Yeah, they still buy that shit. They’re young, impressionable and most still think they’re immortal.
But I’m a little older. I know the enemy can kill us much easier when we travel halfway around the world to their homes. Only a handful of them could make the trip to our country even if we didn’t have a huge (and strangely ineffective) security apparatus. For poor people, it’s expensive and nearly impossible to get to the USA. If we weren’t operating in their country, they’d probably forget we even exist. Our presence here is encouraging their attacks.
By sending us here, you are aiding the enemy. Don’t you realize that?
Anyway, we’re boarding our transport planes and coming to the big Air Force Base in California. If you really support the war, you’ll meet us there. We’ll give you uniforms and our equipment. Our pilot will keep the engines running. Just hop aboard. You’ll be in the war zone in less than 24 hours.
Knock yourselves out.
