Where Abstraction Collides with Reality

I think we've become inured to so much of the rhetoric from both sides of the aisle in Dodge City whenever the subject is the men and women of our armed forces that we don't really do much more than letting it drone on without actually listening to it.

As someone who was in that number for eight years, I'm more than a little tired of folks who attended military boarding school telling me how much they understand and appreciate the sacrifices made by those who serve (and those who love them, a segment of the American population largely invisible to the political prattlers who campaign on their backs). That's just so much horseshit. 

USS Thresher transiting on the surface

Last week, Marines died in a Super Stallion helicopter crash in California, Army aviators perished in an Apache helicopter crash, and the Air Force suffered the loss of a pilot killed in an F-16 jet crash. And that was in one week and it wasn't all of our military casualties. 

The men and women who raise their hands and take the oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic understand that implicit in that oath is the possibility of losing your life.  

We do lots of wreath laying and fulsome (if often hollow) tribute-paying to those who suffer and sacrifice on Veterans Day and  Memorial Day but those in uniform lead dangerous lives every day, until, like those aboard the USS Thresher fifty-five year ago today, they stop having lives. Period. 

USS Thresher shattered on the ocean floor after being crushed by the ocean.

And no amount of thoughts and prayers or tweets can fill the hole in hearts of those missing loved ones who sacrificed the most important thing they had, their lives, so that we can continue to beat our chests, impugn one another's integrity, berate each another about our patriotism and carry on as if none of their silent sacrifices ever happened. Or mattered.
-bill kenny