by Missy Comley Beattie, http://www.opednews.com, 5/5/06
Elaine Brower is a
‘big-mouth woman’ and she has a lot to say, especially, to the Bush
Administration but also to military families and, well, everyone who
has a stake in the survival of this country.
Elaine is a
military parent, a member of World Can’t Wait/Drive Out the Bush
Regime, and Military Families Speak Out. She can’t wait for Bush to be
impeached and she is definitely speaking out. Her son James is a Marine
who served a tour of duty in Afghanistan and deployed to Iraq in March
2006. Elaine drove him to Twentynine Palms, California where she held a
peace vigil outside the military base as he left.
For this mother and so many military parents, every minute of the day is a nightmare. Elaine writes:
DISGUSTED WITH BEING A MARINE MOM
I’d
like to describe the life of a military mom in 2 words: IT SUCKS! My
beautiful son is in the Marine Corps now stationed in Fallujah, eating
dirt and sleeping with rats. I vehemently protested the war from the
beginning. Not only the war, but I really do hate the man who smirks a
lot sitting in the White House, and all those cronies alongside him.
How dare he send my son and other young American soldiers who signed on
the dotted line to protect our country, not to fight an illegal,
immoral, and illegitimate war, for the personal gains of the rich and
elite.
But I digress. Every single day, sometimes twice a day,
I receive these ghastly emails from the Military Volunteer Network,
made up of Stepford Wives and Mothers. There’s lots of rah-rah stuff
and how we should support ‘Our Boys’. They include pictures of them in
full-battle gear running through the streets, or sleeping in the dust
with their M-16s. The captions read anywhere from ‘Our Marines hard at
work’ to ‘Here are our Marines, giving out candy to Iraqi children.’
How disgusting. We have bombed that country back to the Stone Age,
committed genocide, torn apart families and a culture that goes back
thousands of years, and we give the kids candy! Are they nuts or is it
me?
Here’s an email on the network from one of the mothers:
âHello Families of our Deployed Marines,
Just wanted to forward the attached update from (I omitted the name). please enjoy!
If you have any questions, or if there is anything I can do to help you, please let me know.
Hope to see all of you at Family Day on Saturday, May 20th!!!
Take care.’
‘May 1, 2006
I
figured it out. Oh yea, see I have a new religion it is sort of like
Tom Cruise’s, not scientology though, it is Americantology. That is
right. See I was looking at my new flag pole/light pole and listening
to the usual Muslim prayer song when I thought about freedom of
religion and how we all have different religions and can accept them
all and by DOD policy and everybody’s policy we have to respect them
all and can not discriminate against religion. So that means they have
to respect my religion, heck they even have the Wiccas now I’ve read.
So here is what I see. As I need to express my religion, just like I
listen to their prayers five times a day here, I plan to play my
religious music once a day off the roof of my building in downtown
Fallujah. I figure my religion will spread like wildfire through the
boys if I could play the National Anthem, Marines Hymn, Lee Greenwood
God Bless America, and some of the many patriotic songs written by
people like Toby Keith courtesy of the red, white, and blue. They all
fall under my religion. Brass can’t make me take down my religion. I
will run an extension cord with a converter up to power it. If it works
as well as I think it will, maybe I will play it 5 times a day like my
neighbors. They say everyone in a foxhole finds religion, I guess that
must be true.’
Certainly, it’s this kind of nationalism that will put James and our soldiers in even more danger.
My
son agrees that this war is bad, but he was trained by our ‘New’
military. They learned from Viet Nam that you must train in groups so
there is now this buddy system. He fights to keep his buddies alive,
and himself alive. What a dilemma this is for me! I want him to be
alive, I want to hear about his life in Iraq, but am absolutely
appalled that there is a sub-culture of loving death and destruction
belonging to this ‘Military Family’ which I want no part of, but find
myself stuck in.
Pictures, emails, letters, parties, and
stupid smiley faces are the way they group together, these people who
have absolutely no clue as to what is really happening over there. Or
maybe they do. One mother I spoke with said she has to believe her son
is helping the Iraqi people, or she would go mad. I think she is
already there. The devil inside me wants to send these flag-wavers
every single horrible thing I find to scare them into seeing the stark
reality of war. But then I stop myself, because maybe I envy their
ignorance. My existence is one of raging daily against not only this
war, but everything this Republican Administration is doing. They are
crooks, pedophiles, megalomaniacs, and warmongers, only to name a few.
I would love to wake up in the morning and have nothing better to do
than think that my son is someplace nice, helping people. I wouldn’t
have grey hair, lines on my face, and a knot in my stomach and would
stop screaming at everyone all day long.
So what to do? Be
consumed by the Stepford existence of our rah-rah Military Family
organizations packaging up candy, or fight the fight? I know which
course I am taking, do you?
As peace organizations plan the
Mother’s Day Rally in DC, think about Elaine’s challenge. There will be
hundreds of thousands of ‘big-mouth’ women in our Nation’s Capital,
calling for the immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and
Afghanistan and an end to future wars. Let’s help Elaine bring James
and all our soldiers home. NOW!
—
Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She’s written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine.
An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq,
she’s a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel
last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase
J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,’05, she has been writing political
articles.