War? What War?

Carissa is a dear friend and tenacious fighter for the troops. I wholeheartedly agree with what she wrote. I run into this attitude all the time. Carissa sees the lives of the families on base. I see them in everyday life. No one really seems to care what's going on when they have their own problems. At least that's what I want to excuse it as. It's very difficult to contemplate the American people are so self-absorbed with their own lives they don't care there are two military operations claiming lives of our men and women on a daily basis. It's even more difficult to get it through my own brain they don't care about them coming back to a backlog of claims, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain injury, no money when they can't work and faced with having to prove they were wounded. If I ever accepted this appalling fact, my faith in human nature would erode to the point of no return.

When people ask me what I do, they reveal how little they have paid attention. They have a puzzled expression as I explain what my days are like. When I tell them that financially I'm suffering on top of it they are stunned. They cannot understand that most of the people in this country are doing without for the sake of the troops and the veterans. I'm only one of them.

Carissa is another one. With two small children and a husband deployed, she has been doing this work instead of making money as a lawyer. Think of the kind of money she could be making instead of spending countless hours working for free. Why does she do it? Because it is important to her to make sure she changes what's wrong so that we finally get this right. She set aside her own personal needs for the sake of the greater good and finds the American people taking their cues from the media ignoring what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her husband's life is on the line and so are the lives or a lot of her friends.

Read what she has to say and then ask yourself how you could possibly ignore any of this.

War? What War?
Posted on January 27th, 2009
by Carissa Picard in Iraq War, New York News, North American News, Op-ed, US Government News, US News
I am beginning to wonder if the American public thinks former President Bush went ahead and brought home all 140,000 troops from Iraq as an inaugural gift for President Obama (you know, so Obama wouldn't have to trouble himself with it) or if they simply forgot we were still there. Then again, considering the precipitous drop in media coverage of the war in Iraq (the war in Afghanistan was always under-covered in my opinion), who knows what most Americans think is going on in Iraq now.

For example, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Iraq composed 23 percent of network news stories in the first 10 weeks of 2007 but only three percent during that same period in 2008. For cable networks, it dropped from 24 percent to one percent.

Conventional wisdom is that the American public has "lost interest" in the war. I find this troubling. If media coverage is the measure of American interest, we were never particularly interested in the war in Afghanistan and that was the source of the terrorist attacks that led to where we are today.

This lack of coverage—excuse me, "interest"–to date has reached a new low. On 26 January, there was a mid-air collision between two Kiowa helicopters outside of Kirkuk, Iraq, at approximately 2:15 AM. The collision resulted in the death of all four pilots—one of whom was the husband of a friend of mine. My friend and her husband were happily married for many years and had several children together. At 7 AM the following day, my friend was informed that the man she had spent nearly half of her life loving was dead. At 7 AM, she went from being an Army wife to an Army widow; as did, potentially, three other spouses when those helicopters hit one another.

Meanwhile, aviation spouses around the country came together to support her, clicking closing ranks around her. Many are making plans to go visit her, coming from all parts of the country to where she is. Collectively, our hearts are breaking—not only for her loss, but for the losses sustained by all four families. The day after we learned of the collision, most of us remained somber, unable to shake the sadness of losing so many of our own in one night. This collision, like all crashes, was an unasked for and costly reminder of the dangers our loved ones face, and of the emotional Russian roulette we unwittingly play every time we know our soldier is going to fly: it was her husband today, it could be mine tomorrow.

Although this was the deadliest "incident" in Iraq for U.S. soldiers in four months and resulted in the loss of multi-million dollar airframes and soldiers whom the military had invested millions of dollars to recruit, promote, train, retain, and deploy, it did not grace the front page of any major news site after two PM CST Monday. This life changing event for these four families was relegated to the Iraq war page on CNN's, MSNBC's, and yes, even FOX News' websites. After looking for coverage of this collision, I went back and looked to see if any of these three sites had a single story on their main pages about the war in Iraq OR Afghanistan at all. None did. It was infuriating.

Words get used like "war fatigue" to describe the American public and its waning interest. Americans are tired of hearing about war so if the media covers it (or so the logic goes), viewers or readers will tune out and/or go elsewhere for their news. Evidently, men and women dying overseas while carrying out our government's foreign policy just got old.

War fatigue is a luxury not afforded the military community. Those four pilots volunteered to serve this country and their families supported this service. When we choose to love and support our servicemembers, we forego the ability to experience "war fatigue." Quite the opposite, we unwittingly facilitate this luxury for others by keeping the specter of a draft at bay as these wars grind on. In fact, I find it more than a little ironic that voluntary service, which protects Americans from having to face being sent to war involuntarily, seems to be appreciated less by our nation, as opposed to more. Instead, it leads to apathy and "war fatigue." I wonder if those who don't feel like thinking about these wars realize why they are able to do so?

On behalf of every deployed servicemember as I write this—and on behalf of the families who love and support them—I would like to say to the American public, "your welcome."

Carissa Picard is a freelance writer whose husband is a pilot currently serving in Iraq. -- Carissa Picard, Esq.
President Military Spouses of America

I watched the story on CNN of a family selling everything they have on eBay because their kids have health problems. A very admirable thing to do. What ended up happening is that people don't want to buy their possessions. They want to donate instead. So far they've raised $10,000 of the money they need to cover the health care needs of their kids. This proves the American pubic are generous. The need was known and money came in. I'm sure after the story was on CNN, even more donations will flow into them.

In November CNN covered the story of Brenden Foster, an 11 year old boy with Leukemia offering his dying wish for the homeless. KOMO covered the story and then CNN picked up on it. The donations flooded in from around the world soon after.

11 year old Brenden Foster's dying wish, feed the homeless

I have to think that it's not that the American people are so self-centered they fail to step up and help when I've read countless stories like these. The media will say that the people have lost interest in Iraq and Afghanistan but I believe it's the other way around. They made a financial decision and the troops have paid for it with the lack of attention they've been getting. To think of what we could be doing for the troops and the veterans of this nation if the need were known and understood by the American people instead of a tiny percentage of us. Two thirds of the American people do not even know what PTSD is but there are millions of people wounded by it. Ask someone how many died in Iraq or Afghanistan and they don't have a clue.

When the media paid attention and reported on what was going on, there were people in this country slamming them for focusing on the negative without thinking that at least they were reporting on it and connecting the people of this nation with the troops. Now there is nothing being reported and the same people that complained have gone off on their merry way ignoring all of it.

When the protestors focused on Iraq, they ignored Afghanistan. Now there is a new President and a foreseeable conclusion to the occupations of Iraq while the same people who took to the streets protesting it are back to their own lives and not paying attention any longer. Do they feel they've done their job and it's over? No longer claiming lives? The death count in Afghanistan has gone up every year. Do they even know this? Do they think that supporting the troops, as they all claimed they did, ended when they felt as if they won something?

I've complained in the past about the disconnect between the people willing to protest and counter protest across this nation being oblivious to what they could really do to help the men and women serving this nation. I think what Carissa wrote nailed it. When it comes to really supporting the troops they have really been ignored instead.