A Decade Later

This time next week, we will be just about talked out over the first decade of Endless War we have survived since the attacks of 9/11. Not everyone has survived it. And not everyone is an expert on why we do what we do or what we must do next. But stay we do and fight we must. And around the country and around the world we have a generation hitting double digits that has only known a war that has no end, at least not one that any of us might be able to recognize.

Between now and next Sunday, we will all relive every moment of every memory that got us here. Where we go after that, I don't pretend to know. I've spent the last couple of days trying to sort out the last decade aware I'm a long way from home though not as far as those flung across Forward Operating Bases staring into the night, attempting a return to the familiar and the known even when the sky is bible black and the direction unknown.

It feels more like a dream trying to remember when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union and its vassal states imploded and so many of us rushed into the streets to celebrate being alive at that historic moment with total strangers who were celebrating the very same thing. We have books that tell us those feelings are real and those things happened but there are parts still missing.

What we forgot when we exulted that now anything was possible was that everything could now be taken away. That those who had nothing to live for would be able to invent something to die for and then they would want us to die for it, too.

Each of us knows someone from our school, our work, our family, our town who has seen service in a uniform in the last decade, probably more often than one tour of duty and as long as we don't think about any of that too hard, it sort of makes sense. Only when there are moments you're stood up and have to be stock-still, when someone you know is hurt or worse, do the doubts start to creep in and you wonder if what you see is really what you get.

How far can we go on faith alone? At least ten years because there's the marker up ahead. And if you're having a day with a nagging concern and perhaps more of a worry now than you had yesterday, meet someone, Dyrud Felisa, for whom life changed a decade ago and learn how she not only chose to make a difference but to be the difference.

"Now every woman and every man, they wanna take a righteous stand/Find the love that God wills and the faith that He commands. I've got my finger on the trigger and tonight faith just ain't enough. When I look inside my heart, there's just devils and dust." Memor vir, vos es pulvis quod tergum ut pulvis vos vadum reverto.

-bill kenny