Kids At War
Happy New Year! Here's our first post of 2006...This article from the NY Times talks about a 19 year old girl from Kansas who is about to be deployed to Iraq.
Likewise, much of Private [Katherine] Jordan's time at home on the eve of her deployment has been a portrait in contrasts: of a father's fierce pride and worry, but a service member's nonchalance and certainty; of a young woman who now fluently speaks the military language of acronyms and weapons systems, but who still also gossips with her old high school girlfriends like the teenager she is; of a soldier's new, intense focus on the task ahead in Iraq but her admission that, even now, she does not fully grasp all that has happened there.The author only briefly highlights misconceptions about the war in the quote I bolded above. How is the Iraq war about "protecting our country" anymore? If we had never started the war or if we walked out today, would these insurgents suddenly overrun the U.S.? Is that just the naïveté of youth speaking? Or maybe it's just that she's a 19 yr old kid who doesn't watch the news or read the paper? Or maybe she just forgot what dubious claims were made to justify the Iraq war even before it began and now buys into the non-sensical rationalization of the war?
"I don't know all the facts as much as I should," said Private Jordan, of the First Armored Division, 501st Forward Support Battalion, as she sat in her childhood home here. "What I know is that we're protecting our country still. We're concentrating on keeping insurgents away from the United States."
If Private Jordan was once ambivalent about Iraq, she now seems certain she wants to go. She said she knows that her job, as one of only a few female mechanics in her unit, could send her out to pick up disabled vehicles - potential targets for attack. Still, she said, she is more excited than nervous. And she is already anticipating the higher paychecks she will make in a war zone; she said she hopes to save $15,000 so she can buy a car when she gets home.
"Honestly," she said, "a lot of my friends like Iraq. It's not as bad as people say."
posted by Fenton Harwick III at 10:36 AM
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4 Comments:
again someone doesn,t bow to your way of thinking and you label them naive or stupid,way to break new ground there.
sorry my apostrophe ended up a comma.
Explain to me how her statement is not merely an example of misinformation. "What I know is that we're [1] protecting our country still. We're concentrating on keeping [2] insurgents away from the United States."
Regardless of political views, I would imagine that it's difficult to argue that the current state of Iraq war is about either of those things. Saddam was supposedly a threat to our country. He's no longer in power so there goes [1].
Insurgents created BY the war don't seem too interested in gettin to the U.S. to cause trouble. Last time I checked the news they seem to want us out of Iraq so there goes [2].
Maybe I'm picking a semantic argument here but taking that quote at face value, is this really why YOU (Ogre) think we're currently in the war? Particularly, the argument over the insurgents is pretty ironic cause without the war, there wouldn't really be any insurgents would there?
If she is willing to sacrifice her life to make money, and buy a car, then who are we to judge.
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