For Memorial Day : Shipping out to Iraq.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I was looking for another article that I wrote about my brother going to Iraq. I don't think that this is the original that I wrote, I think this is the rough draft. Still it sums up what it is like to have a family member in the Military. When and if I find the one I'm looking for I'll post that as well. I'll also be posting another blog post later this week.

Shipping out to Iraq: 
A sister’s hopes and fears for a brother going to fight for his country in Iraq

I think that people who do not have a son or daughter in the military don’t realize the importance of what is going on in Iraq.

 To many of them it is just something that is happening in another country, something our country just happens to be involved in. They don’t understand that the families of soldiers are going through immense pressure and stress, a kind of stress that they just don’t have in their lives.

I understand this pressure all too well, my brother is a soldier and will be deployed to Iraq in August. We have just found out that he will be deployed, and now we mark every day that he is still in the United States as a day that he is lucky enough to be alive.

You see, to a soldier’s family, just knowing that he is being sent there is no different from a looming death sentence.

We know the reason why he is going and we understand that he is a soldier and it is his job, but at the same time we would prefer that he was not being sent over.

Being a soldier is a hard job; our troops carry more weight on their shoulders than anyone in the United States. They have a responsibility to their family, country and the soldiers in their platoon. They have to get the job done and they only have one chance to get it right.

It’s not like when you are entering data in an office, that you have the chance to go back and try again, our soldiers have to enter it in correctly the first time. If not, there is a chance they have just lost their men.

Without people like my brother this country would not be a free one. Lucky for us there still are men who will put their lives at risk, because they believe that America should stay a free country, that other countries deserve the chance to have democracy. Most of the soldiers who are over in Iraq right now are not there because they believe in George W. Bush, they are there because they want to help the people.

Most of them have said it is hard as they face opposition from some of the people who live there. But they say that once they realize that they have helped build a school, hospital or any other much needed resource for these people, to them that is what being over there is about.

The help that they give, no matter how small or trivial it may seem to us, means so much more to the people of Iraq. We have to remember that soldiers are not there on a political agenda, but are there for the good of human kind. They do not like having to be caught up in a political tug of war and would like no better than to not be engaged in a war at all.

They hold on to the fact that they can make a difference in someone’s life.  They are there,  helping to make this world safer for us; without the soldiers where would we be?

The families of the soldiers hope that this war is not just to make President Bush look like he really cares, that the soldiers are not there to serve as part of his own agenda. That the reason we are there is that this far-off country needed our help, that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the American way of life.

Knowing that our sons, brothers and daughters are over there actually trying to make a difference in the world, trying to help the people is the one thing that keeps us going. For that fact alone, we are all grateful that they have the courage to do the job that they signed up to do