I recently watched a Frontline special on a platoon of American soldiers. It was video shot by the members of the platoon. I was not sure that I knew what to expect since so many different people have tried to put their own take on the war. It seemed that as I watched the videos of the soldiers I got more and more angry at our government and more specifically the president. I have to admit that I was one of those swept up in the patriotic zealotism at the beginning of the war. And yes, I am one of those now out raged by the fact that the reasons we were told about going to war were false. The fact is that we need to fix what we broke. What does become clear until you see it from the stand point of a soldier on the ground in Iraq is the enormity of the mess we have created.
I sympathized with the soldier. They have a long hard job that means putting themselves at risk for a populist who don't (on the whole) appreciate the things that are being done. A soldiers job is to kill and destroy. These soldiers are having to police, rebuild, and be the moral agents for a country. Over and over again in the special the soldiers said it is harder now than when they were fighting to win control of the country. It is understandable that they feel tried and forgotten when our government sends them to a country then doesn't seem to know what it is doing once our soldiers get there. We have built one of the greatest armies in the world. The only problem is that we don't seem to know what to do with it. We are not at war anymore we are at reconciliation with wrong that we must right. In our arrogance we thought that we had a noble cause to invade a country, but now we need to pull out the killers and bring in people to heal this nation we broke.
