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One of our readers and contributors wrote this piece back in July. With the holidays and festivities soon upon us and American soldiers still fighting two wars, Janine asked if I’d repost her article in tribute to friends and family in Iraq and Afghanistan and to all brave men and women fighting for peace and freedom everywhere.

Janine, gladly.

-mario

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A close friend told me he joined the Army to see the world and joked he didn’t realize how much of the world was covered in desert. His comment brought to mind the beginning of the War on Terror and resulting 24/7 news channels’ courting of War. There were ceaseless maps, diagrams, experts, embed reports, and when war casualties ensued– reports of how many died that particular day complete with a profile or two of selected fallen. All other news was relegated to bottom screen crawls or sound bite news seconds.

Over the last six years News has lost interest. It’s taken more glamorous mistresses than old ugly conflicts and relegated its war maps, diagrams, experts, and embedded sweethearts to the country house. News’s most recent 24/7 paramours have been a celebrity death complete with medical and death experts, familial gets, and a grave expert (huh?); the Sotomayor hearings with legal and reverse racism experts; the Dem/Repub health care reform stalemate with health care and political experts; the policeman/homeowner incident with legal and racism experts; and the most gleaming inamorata of all, News consorting with its own self. Did it over cover a story? Is its reporting balanced? All these stories are absolutely newsworthy but should news of troop and civilian war casualties be consigned to bottom screen crawls or sound bite seconds?

Our troops have been dispatched around the world by this Nation to defend her interests. Sometimes these individuals are in mid-desert with no amenities or hygiene products, living with sand in their eyes, mouth, ears and soul. When they do return to Base the store shelves are often empty and some of our troops have no mail, no pedestrian news of home. When these individuals die, their deaths impact whole families and towns. We can but imagine the impact on significant others who have had their lives fragmented in a roadside bomb instant, on now motherless/fatherless children who are either too young to understand anything beyond Mommy or Daddy won’t be home to push them on a swing anymore or old enough to understand one parent can no longer attend their life events.

No matter your feelings about war, about violence, these enlisted men and women deserve our everyday thanks and recognition. They deserve to be more than a news afterthought or statistical crawl at the bottom of the screen. They deserve to know our Nation’s people appreciate them. Hence, if moved to do so, adopt a soldier if you can, or send the occasional anonymous care package or write letters, anything to let these men and women who fight and die to protect how we live know we acknowledge their sacrifice, that they aren’t an afterthought, they are lead stories in our hearts and prayers, let them know they will never be reduced to a news crawl at the bottom of our thoughts.
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