Nothing Like Having Your Family
…be quietly supportive.
All Grown Up — and Going to War
July is a month I sincerely hoped would never come.
At the end of this month, my young son, my only child, deploys with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. His departure had been six months away, three months; now it is a matter of weeks…
…The ironies of this conflict are many for me. More than 30 years ago, I wrote my master’s thesis at Columbia University on “Political Integration of the Kurds in Iraq.” Little did I ever suspect that any child of mine would be a pawn in a senseless conflict in that distant land…
Couldn’t she have held off sending this very PUBLIC message until her hard chargin’ Jarhead was in country? Where maybe mom’s writing the freaking WaPo with her liberally credentialed, anti-war screed wouldn’t embarrass or even demotivate her son in real time?
You’ll notice that NOWHERE in her navel gazing accusations and gloomy prognostications (Mentally deranged? Wounded, even? Scarred and limbs missing? She’s already got him legless in a VA hospital in her mind!) does she mention pride in her son. Nowhere does she speak of the man he has become and how she feels about him. Pitiful. Her letter is a selfish, pitiful intellectual exercise.
Grow up, Ms. ‘Columbia’ and be a man…for your boy. Save the Cindy Sheehan parenting handbook steps for when he’s deployed and busy with the life-or-death life he’s chosen.
Oo-RAH, Marine. Semper Fi.
A Swill Salute to Wake Up, America.
Military Thingies | tree hugging sister | 
July 9, 2007 12:16 pm
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Semper Fi, indeed!
Young man, thank you for your service.
I’m sorry your mother is so self-indulgent.
But it is, after all, all about her.
I can hear his fellow Leathernecks right now:
Oh, God, it’s bound to be brutal.
Thanks for the salute and the link and well said.
THS – yeah, but he’ll prove himself and they’ll come around. Moreover, if anyone ELSE tries that crap with him, his company will rally around him, because they are Marines and not pansies whining in the papers about how life is willfully unfair to only them. As CS Lewis observed, real hardship is an excellent cure for wallowing in imagined self-pity. Them that’s got the most cause to complain are least likely to do it, and that’s how the world goes round.
I second that oo-RAH.
Oh, Diptera, they’re already around, trust me. It’s just a time honored tradition that, whatever the perceived chink in your armor, your fellow Jarheads will ride and rag you unmercifully.
Until they switch to the next unfortunate soul. {8^P
The irony is, she thinks she is being a parent to her child. The reality is that her child is a man now.
The man he is today likely has very little to do with her raising of him, and her parent card was revoked long ago, no doubt due to her myopic agenda and countless inappropriate, self-serving behaviors.
This fruitcake will not likely pull her head from the cranial-rectal inversion long enough to realize that she should be proud of her son. That he became a man in spite of her.