I was on post very early in the morning a few days ago. It was black as night with just orange pools of light from the street lamps. At an intersection our car was stopped by a soldier and then we watched as a whole stream of soldiers stode past in the dark, their rifles glinting darkly.
They looked so young. They clutched their weapons so awkwardly, some of them looked as though the weight of their packs would push them forward into a face plant. They looked around them with innocent, curious faces or stoically pushed forward, eyes down.
"Are those cadets?" I asked Keith.
"No, no," he assured me. It was a regular company, out on a ruck march.
I forget sometimes how much of the bulk of the fighting force is made of up of very young men. Most of them make the choice to serve their country for four years, so there is just this constant influx of young, inexperienced soldiers and an out flux of older, battle hardened ones.
Then there are those like my husband who give two decades of their lives to the service of their country and to the task of keeping these young men alive, so they can return to their families. These are the men whose bodies begin to break down against the weight of their assignments, their back and their ankles and their knees. These are the men that carry the weight of deployment after deployment; an accumulation of loss that compounds with time and each man who dies beside them.
They give up their innocence, their youth, their health. They give up holidays, birthdays, summers, they give up the luxury of peaceful slumber. They frequently loose even their families to the continued stress that serving their country places on their loved ones, again and again.
But still they get up in the dark of four thirty and take up the heavy responsibility of human lives, the lives of those men they are responsible for, and the lives of all the rest of us. For ten or twelve hours they push and shout and coach and direct. They teach by example.
At the end of the day their job is not done. If they get a call in the middle of the night, they are up and responding to it. Period. If our country calls, nothing matters. They have given themselves up completely to our country for twenty years of their lives.
And yet now, that is not enough to earn a retirement? That is not enough to earn whatever health care is available to patch together their broken bodies, the scars left on them, both inside and out, that won't ever fully go away?
We can't offer this to our servicemen and the families that manage to make it through those twenty years right beside them?
It is outrageous.
Now, I am all about cutting government cost, but to cut there? Is that the only fat the government can find to cut; by pass the bureaucrats making twice the private sector, by pass the waste and fraud in government programs, and simply reach right for the front line, to the very men who have pledges their lives to their country, reach for those men instead and take their retirement? That is the best they can come up with?
This government makes me ill.
