Do The Right Thing
J. D. Pendry
VictorySurrender at all costs,victorysurrender in spite of all terror,victorysurrender however long and hard the road may be; for withoutvictorysurrender and defeat of the United States, there is nosurvivalchance for a liberal political victory no matter how short-lived the following celebration might be. -Winston ChurchillThe United States Congress
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. –Mark Twain
I keep having the same nightmare. I see Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, with that no one is home look in their eyes, wearing love beads and peace symbols with daisies in their hair standing in front of the Whitehouse fence. Behind them stands Harry Reid wearing little green rectangular sunglasses with a dirty bandanna tied around his pointy head and strumming on a guitar. Along with a chorus of Congressional backup singers, he drones out the melody all we are saying is give peace a chance. John Kerry raises a defiant fist into the air and tosses someone else’s military medals over the fence. Murtha is hoping to cut another deal with an Arab. The audience is a collection of black turban wearing mullahs holding large serrated knives. They don’t appear at all amused
That Boxer woman is piece of work isn’t she? I believe she is in competition with Nan Pelosi for the title of most whacked out Congressthing to ever escape from California. I recall her belittling attack on Secretary Condoleezza Rice during a Senate charade, also called a hearing.
“Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. [To Secretary Rice] “You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.”
How’s that for a demonstration of Motherly concern -concern that she apparently cannot transfer to the children being murdered every day in Iraq. Actually, Ms. Boxer wasn’t concerned about anyone’s children. She wanted to be as liberally disrespectful as possible to Secretary Rice. At the same time she’d have us believe she was concerned about the Men and Women volunteers who fill the ranks of our Armed Forces and the parents and other family who watch them choose to become Men and Women of honor committed to something greater than self. The other day, before I could find the remote and switch the channel, I was treated to an excerpt from one of her incomprehensible Senate diatribes. In the sound bite, she complained about how much money we’d spent and how many lives we have lost fighting George Bush’s misguided war. Then she asked, “When are we going to have the guts to do the right thing?”
If you listen to any news at all, some talking head or politician will repeatedly remind you that according to one pollster or another, a huge percentage of Americans want to quit Iraq. Pollsters are actually running the United States nowadays because the politicians we elected are unable to make informed and principled decisions on our behalves. I don’t need a pollster to tell me that 100 percent of Americans want to leave Iraq. I just don’t think they want to leave on Ms. Boxer’s, or for that matter, the entire Democrat Congress’ terms. My question for Ms. Boxer and the others who have sold their souls for political power is what exactly the right thing to do is – that also requires guts?
Ms. Boxer and many of her political colleagues, not all of them Democrats, hold the same disdain for our country and our military as does this idiot. Mr. Rall is a manifestation of the rhetoric coming from the mouths of polidiots. Durbin’s Nazis, Kerry’s illiterates, Kennedy’s torture chamber operators, Rangle’s downtrodden, and Murtha’s cold blooded murderers. They speak it, he draws it. It shouldn’t surprise anyone. According to the pollsters most of us must be OK with it.
Stupid people do and say these things when they have no concept of the real enemy faced or the ramifications of just quitting. Disparaging someone that you know will not harm you does not require guts. In fact it is the most obvious demonstration of cowardice one might come across. I looked, but was unable to find the courageous Mr. Rall’s Mohammed cartoons.
In the first part of my nightmare we did Ms. Boxer’s version of the right thing and immediately withdrew from Iraq. Shia Iran and the Shia Iraq began their religious genocide of the Iraqi Sunnis. The Turks invaded Northern Iraq to take out the Kurds and grab the Northern oil fields. Sunni Saudi Arabia, Sunni Syria and Sunni Jordan refused to stand by and watch the Persian led Sunni genocide in Iraq. The entire region imploded. Western economies dependent on Middle Eastern oil collapsed. President Hillary agreed to terms with the Mullahs, backed by Russian and Chinese nukes, who were now running the new caliphate.
My nightmare always end the same way. In a cold sweat, I run out to the bunker and check my food, water, medical and ammunition supplies. If you need me, that’s where I’ll be.
Copyright © J. D. Pendry 2007
July 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Well, your nightmare just got my adrenalin flowing! (she said, while looking up gun stores In VA)
Yep, Boxer is a piece of work, right there with Pelosi, Woolsey, Lee, Waters and Farr.
Can we have The People’s Republic of CA’s statehood rescinded? Seems they don’t much like the country they’re a part of anyway….
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:28 am
I am greatly disturbed by this comment by Ms. Boxer.
“Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. [To Secretary Rice] “You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.”
It seems to be the consensus of the left that liberty should come with no price. It should be given freely with no limit or cost to those who want to
reap the rewards of freedom but dont’ want to bear the cost.
I wrote a short piece for a veterans group that should be of interest to Ms. Boxer but I doubt that she would understand it at all.
The Soldier’s Price
This evening, after 35 or more years I’ve decided to write down my thoughts, at the request of a friend, on something my father said to me when I decided to make my career as a soldier.
I can’t remember what brought it up, but dad and I were talking about being in the military. I suppose it was because I had just told him of my decision to re-enlist.
He said to me if I was going to be a professional soldier that I should be aware that there was a price to pay for that decision. I perhaps wouldn’t understand today, and he wasn’t going to explain but that there was a price and it was a high one. He was correct that I didn’t understand just exactly what he meant but I was aware that he was serious about what he was talking about. He also said that as I got older, that I would begin to understand and when I did, it would be a revelation to me.
My family history isn’t anything special, dad was an independent businessman, and he owned an industrial maintenance company and was, at that time, a manufacturer of hydraulic presses. I knew that he’d been in WWII but not much more than that. Later he told me he had been on Guadalcanal with the Raiders and was wounded there. He was discharged because of wounds and spent the rest of the war as the captain of a seagoing tug pulling barges from Puget Sound to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. My mother was, well simply that, my mother. My Grandmother came from Missouri during the depression; her family was among, from what I understand, one of the first to settle in Cooper County, Missouri. I don’t know much at all about the rest of my family only the name of my Grandfather. I know that I had soldiers on both sides in the civil war or as my grandmother called it, “The War of Northern Aggression” so you can guess which side her father was on.
I find it interesting that most Americans don’t know anyone who is a Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Coastguardsman or Marine. Most civilians, when they think of soldiers (if they ever do) and of the soldiers price, think that it is the cost of keeping a soldier, the beans, and bullets, pay and billets. The cost of maintaining the equipment and bases. The cost of transportation uniforms and tin-ware in all its myriad forms. Paperwork and computers, It goes on forever in more and more stuff.
While this is a part of the price of a soldier, the “Soldiers’ Price” is completely different. Paid in blood, tears and vast amounts of physical effort, pain and suffering. Sometimes it is paid in the most precious of currency, human life. I don’t think anyone can really understand the “Soldiers’ Price” without having served as a member of the military. It doesn’t matter if you were in the Army, Navy, Airforce, a Coastguardsman or a Marine, you will taste the communion wine of the “Soldiers’ Price” If you haven’t been there you won’t understand, believe me when I tell you this. Until you have “seen the elephant” you will be as the blind men in the children’s fable. I hope that when you finish reading this, you will get a small blink of understanding. Also understand that I don’t wish on anyone who doesn’t make the choice freely and without reservation the “Soldiers’ Price”.
The “Soldiers’ Price” is paid in time away from family and friends, It’s paid by the loss of time with your love. Paid in far distant lands, cold nights in the rain and wind. It’s paid with days in hot sweltering lands, with days or even weeks without a bath or clean clothing. Water that is bitter and so stinking that it gives you the bloody runs and no matter how much you wash it leaves you as dirty as before. Paid by disease and wounds both received and dealt. It’s paid with pay so short that there is always more month at the end of the paycheck than there is paycheck to provide for your family. It’s paid with making do, repairing and using up no matter what. It’s paid with the memory that your children are growing up so fast and because of Duty, Honor, Country and the sacred oath you made when you enlisted, you can’t spend the time they deserve with them.
The “Soldiers’ Price” is paid by remembering the men (and these days the women) who didn’t make it home and the guilt of knowing that you could have, should have and would have if necessary, died along with them but for some inexplicable reason, you survived. It’s paid at times, with fear overcome, terror Conquered and determination not to let fear rule and prevent completion of the mission.
It’s paid with enduring the cruel cuts of civilians who are the recipients of the liberty you defend. By ignoring the comments of relatives that believe that the only reason you stay in the military is because you “can’t make it on the outside”. It’s paid with the knowledge that at the end of a long career when you retire or are discharged you will have to go back to work starting at a low pay scale that all of your same-age peers have long since left.
But, is it worth it?
Positively, if I hadn’t paid the “Soldiers’ Price”, I wouldn’t remember far places that I have seen. I remember Jungles, dark, thick and humid, with mist through the trees drifting like smoke. Mountain passes with high-thrust peaks above and forests hidden under clouds below. I remember rice paddies embanked high with water buffalo pulling plows through the muck and mud. I remember desert landscapes with the horizon curving off, sand, rock and clay unbroken by anything but the sky” I remember sunsets brilliant with all the colors of God’s palette displayed in glory.
Unless I‘d been willing to pay the “Soldiers’ Price”, I’d have no memory of people that even today, after all these years, I am in awe of the determination and bravery I witnessed. I wouldn’t remember the wry humor under great danger and difficulty. I wouldn’t remember men, (and women) I would never have met without the chance to pay the “Soldiers’ Price”.
Because I paid the “Soldiers’ Price” I also have nights when I can’t sleep, when memories that I wish I could lose appear with teeth bared and flashes of darkness that keep me until dawn breaks. What if I had, Could I have, I wish I had, and why did, are thoughts that creep in between me and sleep, push it out and leaves disturbance in its’ wake.
Faces places and incidents surface when I least need them and occupy my waking time at times when I least expect them.
I can smell the smoke of dust raised by bullets striking around me and wake to the stench of combat from my sleep.
I hear the last, lost words of my comrades in my memories.
Would I pay the “Soldiers’ Price” again?
You bet! Absolutely! Always and forever I am grateful for the privilege of defending my nation, my family and my friends. I look with pride and am grateful for those who see and understand the necessity of taking up the burden of the “Soldiers’ Price”. I accept the memories and the disturbance those memories bring, also the joy of memories that I wouldn’t have without having paid the “Soldiers’ Price”. These are a part of what formed me and make me who I am. I remember those who went before me and honor their names and sacrifice. I keep all this in a sea bag of past days I keep close to me always, packed and buckled. I feel sorry for all those who never made the choice to pay the “Soldiers‘ Price“. They will never understand, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I am, like my father, an independent businessman, mostly retired but I still do a little work (my wife says “darn little”) I make Grill badges and Hitch Covers for cars and desk plates for executive desks and emblems for office and home decoration. They are all (just about all anyway) military unit patches and insignia. On the desk plate and decoration bases I now engrave the words “Remember the Soldiers’ Price”. It is on the bottom of the base because the “Soldiers’ Price” is often not seen unless looked for. It is often not seen except by accident. Because we should all remember the “Soldiers’ Price”.
James L. Wright
SSG, (Ret)
Feb 2006