IMO we cannot justify killing one single captured terrorist, if we do not also kill our own convicted war criminals.

Maybe your words sing out a bit to much blanket forgiveness for our soldiers for my taste. People have to be accountable for their actions and we have to hold them accountable with punishment. Otherwise we are no different than the nazis. In that case patriotic fervor can go to hell.

I just want all the “glory” taken out of war. People understand their duty. They don't need the BS. If they don’t understand their duty they soon will when they get there.

Another thing; For a nation that holds human life so unquestionably precious, we certainly minimize the affect of collateral damage and rationalize away innocent death a bit to much for my taste.

A few years back in Iraq, the media brought to us pictures of the aftermath of an entire Iraqi family wiped out in their own home by a squad size Marine force. The picture of a pink house shoe worn by an adolescent girl that had answered the door, laying in blood, sent me spastic. Old pictures in my mind became vivid again. I reeled in anger for days until I realized that I was looking for someone to vent my anger on. There was no one worthy of such anger. Possibly nobody in the whole world. No justice either, by the out come of the court-martials, IMO.

But it’s war. It’s just friggen evil.

There is a time to criticize and a time to honor the dead. This post was about honoring the dead. One should protest and protest loudly that which is wrong, but protesting at a funeral is beyond what I would do, and this post is about funerals and inspired by a president in the middle of the night standing at attention to honor the dead. I don't disagree with you sentiments, but rather with your timing.

tidbits

This post was mentioned on Twitter by GfeLondon: Obama Witnesses: The Escorts of the Dead http://bit.ly/1FCoen...

What I was trying to convey is that the picture is so much more
complex. We honor the dead is a little like the blue wall the cops
create around them. It becomes impenetrable, without nuance, not
talk-about-able. Sure we honor the dead, but we also mourn them, feel
angry about the political reasons why they died, and wonder aloud of the
necessity.

I am thinking of the Clint Eastwood movie, where he plays the role of a
life long soldier now retired, who has lost two sons to war, and now his
third is murdered, and the military is stonewalling. The father
essentially fights the military and wins but in the process loses all
the honor and dignity he once held for the military and his wife is
shattered having given all her progeny to the military. In the
beginning he raises the flag every morning in front of his house. At
the end he does the same but the flag is upside down. Who is the
football star, whose family had to hear multiple excuses as to how he
died only to find out he was killed by friendly fire.

Decades after Vietnam, my brother is angry……he holds “sempri fi”
proudly in a small room inside his head, but the rest of him is highly
conflicted……while desserters and draft dodgers were forgiven, the
military would not forgive him. He gave 3 years of his life protecting
the nation, and the nation, through its military essentially said “drop
dead.”

I think that is likely what I do……. there is a small room in my
heart where I can honor the dead unequivocably, but the rest of me has
very many mixed feelings about the whole thing…………and mostly is
very sad.

I don't have a son, but if I did I would feel very very badly if in his
youthful bravado he were to choose the military path as a means of
expressing it. I wouldn't stop him, but I would feel very
sad…..especially if I lived in a place where the black cars roll by
every day and the sound of taps enter into my
consciousness…………..for my brother that is likely all that would
be required to trigger his PTSD.

I also have to agree that war, in all its forms, needs to be avoided if at all possible. The lives of our soldiers and our opponents must never be taken lightly.

Thank you.

I think because it raises too many uncomfortable questions.

It's not that I disagree with what anyone has written here, about respecting and honoring the soldier who sacrifices for his nation even when the leaders of his nation had no business asking him to make that sacrifice. But what do we say when the sacrifice itself is the indictment against the war — against war itself? It's easy enough to say we have such respect for the sacrifice of a soldier who dies engaging the enemy. But what do we say to the parents of a soldier who took his own life because he could not live with the pain of what he saw, and sometimes did? What do we say to, or about, the soldier who is clinically depressed, suicidal, having flashbacks and nightmares, years after he came home? Can we say that the sacrifice of this man's mind is something to honor and respect?

I think what it's about, ultimately, is that there are some sacrifices that are actually crimes — against the person who has sacrificed. We have to find a way to come to grips with that truth, because until we do, the soldiers who need our love and concern the most will continue not to get it.

Ghost

There is no sin in sharing mutually held feelings. It bonds us and makes it easier to disagree with respect when we do disagree, and that is often.

That you sing a different tune than this choir does not go unappreciated. Another day on another post on another subject, perhaps on suicide among veterans or veteran's benefits or the treatment of surviving soldiers or the horrors of war, I might sing in your choir, but not today, not on the subject of this post.

Below are some poetic veteran voices who honor the dead while at the same asking WHY?

“So we lift up to you voices much more eloquent than our own, voices of soldiers who survived the worst fighting human beings have ever experienced, World War One. For nearly 100 years, the wisdom and compassion of their poetry has endured. Their words now stand as one of the world’s most powerful witnesses to the madness of war.”

You must hear them.

And you yourself would mutter when
You took the things that once were men,
And sped them through that zone of hate
To where the dripping surgeons wait;
And wonder too if in God's sight
War ever, ever can be right.
– From “Foreword” by British ambulance driver, Robert Service

And
…If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
– From “Dulce et Decorum est” (It is Sweet and Right to Die for Your Country)
by British Army Lt. Wilfred Owen, killed a week before the 1918 Armistice.