“Give Me Tomorrow…” Was All He Asked…

You might recognize the uniform…might not, sense to which war this soldier belongs…sense not, but frankly, any soldier, in any war, when his response as to what his only wish would be for Christmas, is for “tomorrow”, the vacancy in his look, that “thousand mile stare”, all men from all campaigns are one to another when the light at the end of their individual hellish tunnel is so far off…

I am so “old” now, as others have been during similar past campaigns, not young enough to fight, but oh, so old enough to suffer the hurt, the guilt of not fighting and feel powerless when actually OUR old right hook maybe more powerful with our life experience behind it.
Today, yeah, sure, TONS of remembrance blog posts out there….but to me, all that rings true is the sameness of all wars, the sameness in the hurt and the devastation, man to man, country to country, a world of hurt.
We have men, right now, hunkered down in some God-forsaken Iraqi desert dune or some high mountain Afghan stronghold, waiting for some bed-sheet wearin’ back-country, cousin-marrying beast to lash out at them…we WILL categorize them, and we WILL racial-slur them because it makes blowing their heads off that much easier.
But we all will come back to our LZ or to our MASH outpost and we WILL look like that soldier above. We may have won the battle, hell, even win the war, in the end, but we will come back “lost” and the old folks. like me, will feel immense guilt and utter helplessness to those walking wounded…
I can’t do as I once did at 21…I could lie to you and say I can…I can’t.
We – the old ones – just wait and worry and, at first, say Good Bye…

Then wait for the day when we can say Hello again…
And in the meantime, the fires rage…
the screams are felt and not just heard…
and the dead are not counted, but corded, like wood…
and as the days tick by, the toll…takes its toll.
We of the Home Front, do the Do and work the Work,
and in and out of the fray, we just all pray…

No, the sameness of war is deafening in its strength, yet, are we all, generation after generation, deaf to its lesson?
Some wars were fought because real tyrants lusted to rule the earth and wield their deadly stick of control, now, it seems, we fight for oil…
Yes, I'm no fool, the back wings of the Capital and Parliament voted Yes for money and for power, after all, War is Profit, but somehow, we started to fight for other reasons than just to preserve future Peace and Freedom.
At what cost and with who’s lifedo we fix bayonets and lunge forward?
Is the price to pay too hefty for the rewards sought?

And when do we lose our very souls in the quest?
From this sense (oh, and when you hit Play, play it LOWWWWD, Man!),
to that sense, we evermore sing the same song…

Dedicated to my Uncle, Lorne Miller, who fought at too young an age on D-Day...