Afghanistan: Save Lives, Not Face

Does anyone but the immediate families and friends know the names or even care about the seven American soldiers who were senselessly allowed to die May 4, in our lost war in Afghanistan simply to save face? But more on them later.

Back on April 22, 1971, a young, decorated Vietnam War veteran  give among the most riveting testimony ever before a Congressional committee. Speaking on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), that shaggy dark haired vet said this which should be taught in every US history class in America:

"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war'. We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?  How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?   

History has a tendency to inflict extreme irony on its actors. That eloquent patriot and hero, John Kerry, parlayed his instant fame speaking truth about our criminal and failed Vietnam War into a 28 year run as US Senator, 2004 Presidential candidate and now Secretary of State. His current role includes letting soldiers needlessly die in Afghanistan by pretending we have a valid purpose in continuing to fight that war till it is mercifully concluded on December 31, 2014. Neither John Kerry, nor his boss, President Obama, started the Afghan war, and unlike many of the unrepentant Congressional warmongers like John McCain (Rep. AZ), Lindsay Graham (Rep. SC) and Mark Kirk (Rep. IL), they have the good sense and decency to put a cork, albeit 600 days out, on the bottle of endless blood we've allowed to bleed out for the past eleven and a half years.

We know that so far 2,216 US soldiers have died in Afghanistan for a mistake. We will never know how many thousands of innocent Afghan men, women and children we've needlessly slaughtered because we dare not put a number on it, just like we refuse to acknowledge the two million Vietnamese we slaughtered when John Kerry was playing "shootemup", in the jungle. And quite frankly, our government does not care. If we did we wouldn't be mistakenly bombing Afghan wedding parties to this day simply because a large gathering of Afghan humans in an open area could be imagined bad guys.

The extreme irony for John Kerry, is that a Congressman could haul him before a Congressional committee, look him in the eye and ask, "Secretary Kerry, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Afghanistan? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake"?

Four years and 24 days after the idealistic John Kerry asked those questions to Sen. William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kelton Rena Turner, an 18 year old Marine, became the last man to die for the Vietnam War mistake. While we won't know till the end of next year who will be the last man (or woman) to die for the Afghan war mistake, we know for sure it will not be one of the seven who died last Saturday.