2013-05-20T22:22:13-04:00 Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=kevin-bell Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Kevin Bell Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1999587 2012-10-22T09:55:27-04:00 2012-12-22T05:12:01-05:00

Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/ Afghanistan.

They're probably correct. Most Americans are tired of Afghanistan and would rather not hear another diatribe about our failures there, much less read a detailed analysis of the specific policies that are implicated in our missteps. I have spent the past three years studying Afghanistan as a historian, and even I sometimes tire of the relentless drone of negative news, which incidentally is often about drones.

Our politicians are more than crafty enough to know that it is difficult to sell a tragic story that people don't want to hear, but sometimes I wonder if a different kind of truth-telling approach to the campaign in Afghanistan might work better for their purposes. Perhaps I can do them a favor by offering some off-color ideas about how to spice up the conversation at their next yacht-club gathering or political fundraiser when the topic turns to "Amurrka's" war in Afghanistan.

First of all, we have long needed to dispense with the notion that all of our soldiers are tall, handsomely proportioned Hollywoodesque heroes and heroines who serve their flag without fault or hesitation. The truth is usually much more interesting, if not always amusing, and makes for lots of "good times" in our current counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan. I remember one particularly long air assault mission in the mountains of Paktya Province that ended with mixed results. My platoon found the biggest cache in recent memory on that mission, but a tragicomic chain of events more than offset this tactical gain as we were en route to our pickup site.

When the pilots at our brigade headquarters were grounded because of the low cloud ceiling and poor visibility, our large element of Afghan and American soldiers was forced to begin a long exfiltration from the high mountains on foot. For various reasons the decision was made to begin this movement at night. Of course, God doesn't always come to our mission briefings or answer our prayers and about an hour into our march down the valley a torrential rainstorm opened up on our heads. In the best of scenarios, heavy rain is unpleasant. In that steep valley, it meant a flash flood and so all of us began a mad scramble up the slick, muddy slopes of the mountain on the right bank of the river. In that moment all that any of us could do was avoid tumbling down into the rapidly deepening water scouring the rocks that had formed our path only moments before.

On a good day we were all tough guys. But now we were slipping in the mud, using machine guns as crutches, cursing heaven, and lurching one step uphill for every four that we attempted. By the time that I reached the high spot on the spit of land where I would spend the night, my one pair of pants was ripped at the crotch, I was covered in mud, and I must have looked like a naughty version of Swamp Thing. I survived that horrible night shivering by a fire and wearing my sleeping bag as a jacket only to discover that several of my soldiers had experienced a similar wardrobe malfunction during the previous evening's muddy bacchanal. Worst of all, we had to walk another three miles down the valley in our ripped pants that day. And yes, the further downstream that we went, the more populated the towns became. American soldiers covered in mud conducting counterinsurgency and winning hearts and minds in ripped pants? #MuslimRage anyone?

It would be a relief if the anecdotes that our politicians told about the war in Afghanistan didn't center on their efforts to prove their mealy mouthed enthusiasm for the hard work and sacrifice of Amurrkan soldiers. But naturally, I don't seriously expect incidents like "Pants-gate 2008" to make an appearance in stump speeches any time soon. In truth, even though the candidates' bland platitudes about veterans and war are difficult to stomach, there is no end in sight. The various insurgencies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are rooted in an interconnected set of seemingly intractable political problems. The complexity of this system of violence virtually guarantees that it will not be directly addressed by American politicians with nuanced policy recommendations during an election campaign.

Soldiers can get into horrible messes even when they don't mean to, and as I discovered in the mountains of Paktya, some days you eat the bear and some days the bear has too much self respect to bother eating you. But although laughter sometimes seems like the only possible reaction to the absurdity of war, I find that it does little more than help me to process my own personal experiences. For a more brutally honest sense of how to form an appropriate response to the nauseating levels of violence that we find across Afghanistan, I have had to turn to some surprising sources.

Part Four of Roberto Bolaño's monumental novel 2666 is a soul-wrenching account of the often futile pursuit of answers about the origins of widespread violence. When I read 2666 in 2010 I was impressed by the applicability of Bolaño's intuition about the series of femicides in Ciudad Juarez to analysis of the war in Afghanistan. Bolaño's novel boldly refuses to satisfy our burning hunger for clarity about the cause of the violence in Ciudad Juarez, and instead forces us to meditate on the possibility that our desire for a simple answer about who is responsible for the murders may be a part of the problem. Like Bolaño's narrative, we should be suspicious of any easy assessments of America's war in Afghanistan, especially when they pretend to offer a simple solution.

With respect to Afghanistan, as Vice President Joe Biden recently put it, we will be "out in 2014." Of course, this is a statement designed for public consumption during a campaign, and it does little to help us understand what kind of calculus is going into our actual strategy for withdrawal in Afghanistan. In any event, the relative lack of focus on Afghanistan in this presidential election season seems to indicate that America will have lost interest in this war long before the eventual withdrawal date. But the spread of extremist groups based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region that support the use of political violence abroad is not a problem that can be completely solved by the presence or absence of American troops and money in Afghanistan. It would be nice if the American public occasionally demanded a detailed recognition of this fact from its politicians, but I'm no longer surprised when candidates dodge, equivocate, and repeat the same easy lines. It's easy to make war sound simple when you aren't covered in mud and in need of a new pair of pants.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1826400 2012-08-28T09:20:35-04:00 2012-10-28T05:12:04-04:00

Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/ SPC Sonny Mazon opened my eyes to the tragic link between depression, drugs, incarceration, and suicide in the military community.

I had been so naïve. Of course, during the deployment many of us swapped stories of comrades abusing prescription drugs like Ambien while overseas, and I had a vague sense that this would get worse when my platoon returned home in 2009. Even so, I never expected that almost 2 years after I left the Army I would still be receiving tragic news about my soldiers, their families, and the ending that awaits those who never get the help they need.

Mazon's particular problem was a relatively common one. He suffered from PTSD relating to the death of his best friend PFC Ara Deysie on a combat patrol. Soldiers deal with this kind of intense emotional trauma in different ways, but it is safe to say that not enough of us get the right kind of treatment. Most of us were sometimes angry or sad, and I periodically experienced violent flashbacks.

Only the intervention of a friend convinced me to seek help with a chaplain. Many soldiers bottle up their feelings instead, often with troubling results. One of us joined the French Foreign Legion after separating from the Army. Two more of us were killed when the platoon deployed to Afghanistan again after I left the military in 2010, and Mazon eventually turned to drugs to numb the pain. The rest of his story of domestic violence, incarceration, and suicide may be too horrible for words, but we can't pretend that he was a unique case.

In the midst of this mess, many people are looking for answers. Why didn't Mazon get treatment? Why are there so many soldiers like him who slip through the cracks? How much do we really understand about the link between depression, drug use, imprisonment, and suicide? As long ago as 2009 there was published evidence that veterans are disproportionately represented in prison populations, that substance abuse is the most statistically significant predictive factor in their arrest, and that those who suffer from PTSD are far more likely to commit suicide than we would otherwise expect.

Retired General Peter Chiarelli has become a champion of veteran's mental health issues, and we would do well to heed his call to dramatically increase the amount of research conducted on these problems, and integrate this new knowledge into our treatment and mental health screening for soldiers.

There is also the exciting possibility that improvements in MRI technology could allow us to better identify the structural problems in the brain that might be at the root of some of the mental health issues that combat veterans face after a traumatic brain injury.

But our society's often puerile reaction to discussions about drugs and depression must change if we are going to see any permanent improvements in mental health treatment take root in the at-risk veteran population.

Although we don't do it intentionally, many of us participate in a conspiracy of silence about the reality of drug abuse in this country. We laugh about the cocaine problems of celebrities and petty criminals in shows like "Cops," but aside from being in poor taste, this does nothing to help us understand what is happening when men and women who have served this country honorably disintegrate into a nightmare of sadness, drugs, and pain.

We all need to be more open about the connection between depression and substance abuse, including alcohol. If not, then in a few short years we will have a repeat of the disastrous increase in the number and proportion of homeless and out of work veterans that was seen after Vietnam. Obviously, we would all prefer to talk about the positive side of our veterans' stories, how proud we are of them, the sacrifices they make, and the strength that they show. But sometimes what we actually need is to have an honest conversation about the darker side of the community in order to begin to deal with the problem.

The Army is certainly aware of the magnitude and nature of the issues that face our veterans, but what about the rest of us? We can all do a lot more. God knows that although it's too late to save Sonny Mazon, with the right kind of systemic change there are thousands of soldiers just like him that we might be able to reach in time.

This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.

HuffPost Live will be taking a comprehensive look at America's failed war on drugs August 28th and September 4th from 12-4 pm ET and 6-10 pm ET. Click here to check it out -- and join the conversation.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1256290 2012-02-07T12:46:57-05:00 2012-04-08T05:12:01-04:00

Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/
He didn't get the help that he needed to heal the pain of his memories from Afghanistan, and as he withdrew from his friends and family he descended into an abyss of sadness. His relationship with his girlfriend had always been problematic, but it became violent. He hurt her badly in a fit of rage, was arrested for domestic abuse, and chose to end his life.

We shouldn't whitewash over the violence of his actions, but the context of his life story does help us to see his crime in a different light. I met Sonny Mazon when I took over our newly created infantry platoon in 2008. We were a Frankenstein's monster of a unit that was cobbled together from other platoons, but before long we had become something special. Privates like Sonny were a huge part of that.

Sonny had a magic touch as a gunner and we all took immense pride in his skill and courage. Our platoon would eventually become one of the most decorated small elements in the 101st Airborne Division with two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star Medal with Valor, and four Army Commendation Medals with Valor on top of a smattering of Purple Hearts and other awards. Mazon saw plenty of action in those firefights, but ultimately it was the mission that he didn't go on that became a source of such pain for him.

On May 9, 2008 I gave Mazon a rest day while the rest of us went up into the mountains. When his best friend PFC Ara Deysie was killed that afternoon, Sonny couldn't forgive himself for staying home. When he left the Army, he went to Veterans Affairs for help but nothing panned out. It might have been the long lines, the waiting rooms, or the bureaucratic nightmare of the paperwork, but Sonny never got the right counseling. Eventually Mazon's support network shrank to a handful of loved ones. So when even his friends and family became estranged from him, there was no safety net to catch him and he descended deeper into darkness.

The system continued to fail him after his arrival in prison. The media didn't bother to do any research about who he was or the origins of his violence, and so his name has been unnecessarily dragged through the mud by CBS Local Los Angeles. Worst of all, Sonny managed to hang himself on suicide watch. No one can say why a guard didn't stop him, but somehow he must have become a higher priority once he fell into a coma. As the doctors came to harvest his organs this weekend, there were four police officers assigned to guard the empty shell of his body. Heartbreaking.

The tragedy of Mazon's lonely battle with PTSD is that it was so avoidable. For all of our rhetoric of supporting soldiers with PTSD, there is a dense, bureaucratic labyrinth in between soldiers and the help that they need. The VA is far more effective at denying benefits than it is at providing useful services to people like Sonny. Of course, once someone enters our criminal justice system, we act as though they are no longer a person.

Our two-faced politicians are eager to curry favor with religious communities, and yet none of them will stand up for the dignity of prisoners as human beings. Instead, our society tosses people like Sonny into the garbage heap of life. That's part of why we have so many homeless veterans, veterans who can't find jobs, and veterans who are lost in a maze of pain and don't know the way out. This is unacceptable.

When I look at the hollow-eyed mug shot of Sonny that peers at me from the police blotter report, I hardly recognize him. When I think of Private Mazon, I remember a hot July afternoon in Afghanistan when my platoon unloaded a few thousand cases of water into shipping containers. By evening the boys were getting loopy, and we started a huge water fight to let off some steam. Sonny and I ran around like children in our uniforms and poured water bottles down shirts, into pockets, and on heads. The dust of the day gummed up our hair, and in the softening light I have a distinct memory of Mazon's dirt-smudged smile. Sonny, wherever you are, I hope that you have found a bit of that joy again, and maybe a release from your pain.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1248593 2012-02-02T08:56:42-05:00 2012-04-03T05:12:01-04:00

Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/
I had visions of the unfolding of the attack in Chicago's streets, a Target parking lot, and my uncle's home. I clawed my way back from the choking smell of explosives and blood on evenings at jazz clubs, and when I watched ridiculous movies like "Iron Man." I wanted to listen to Afro-Caribbean tunes and laugh at Hollywood's almost sexual obsession with the military industrial complex. And usually I did. But some nights it didn't work out that way.

The first step on the road to healing was admitting that there was something wrong. A few months later I finally walked into my Chaplain's office and told him that I needed his help with something. He gave good advice; find someone you trust and talk to them until the memories start to make sense. So I did, and I am forever indebted to the one who listened. With that, the flashbacks ended, but I don't just want the upsurge of emotion to stop. I want to take charge of my experiences and harness them so that I can understand this life and the messed up things that war has shown me.

At first this desire to channel the fury of my memories was focused on writing articles about Afghanistan and combat ethics. These were steps forward. However, when I want to express the way that the loss of my father changed how I saw the night sky in the mountains of the Afghan border, I know that an editorial about defense policy isn't going to help very much.

For millennia soldiers and civilians have turned to poetry to help explain the horrors and ecstasies of war. Unfortunately, whether we like to admit it or not, U.S. infantrymen have been given the idea that poetry isn't for tough guys. It's our loss as a culture because many of the words that could help us to make sense of the results of our society's pride have never been set to paper. But it's also our loss as soldiers because it has robbed many of us of the chance to explain ourselves, and maybe to grasp what it means to be so fiercely human that we are willing to kill each other and to die.

To those of you who have been in my shoes; even if you never show anyone what you write, trust me, it makes a difference. And if you want to share what you've written, please let me know. I'd love nothing more than to read the verses of my fellow Afghanistan veterans. To show you that I'm being serious about this, I'm including a draft that I've been working on. If we work together on this, I'm convinced that we can find someone interested in publishing poetry from the Afghan front. We might all be surprised by how many people would want to read it.


To Dad

I suddenly felt the urge to tell you Dad,
about the view I had of the peak of Sheykh Maray
as I waited until the helicopters came
to destroy the bombs we found in the bottoms.
But you're resting now in the dirt by your granddad's church,
and I can never explain
the beauty of the midnight stars from that windbitten ridge,
and how the clouds made a river in the valley below me
reflecting the cold glow of the moon up to my nest among the rocks.
I looked out at the embers of campfires across the gulf,
and I may as well be whispering to those distant sleepers
curled among their sheep and their long axes,
shivering away the chill of that summer night
on an island a mile across a sea of mist,
stone,
and pine,
at least I can imagine they might hear me,
now that you're gone.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1096086 2011-11-29T10:37:03-05:00 2012-01-29T05:12:01-05:00

Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/
There is no moral to this awful story, but we would do well to reflect on the circumstances of Robert's death. Like it or not, Davidson sits at a chokepoint for traffic between I-77 and I-85. The town has bravely withstood the kind of breakneck-speed development that has eaten away the local character of many surrounding communities, but it gets harder every year to keep out the noise and mess of urbanization. There is little that Davidson can do to slow the growth of the nearby cities that are increasing the traffic flow on Davidson-Concorde Road, but perhaps there are additional safety measures that can be taken by the town to protect locals.

In many ways we are all implicated in this. We have all rushed through small town America on our way to somewhere "more important". We often think of a town's low speed limits as a speed trap to improve revenue instead of a way to keep people safe. We can disagree about the benefits of growth, but we need to stop pretending that we are so important that we deserve to drive through towns unhindered by crosswalks and speed limits. For me personally however, this necessary discussion also kind of misses the point.

What breaks my heart about Dr. Whitton's death is less the idea that I could have walked out into the street in his place, or even the thought that my own error could have easily caused such an accident. The sadness comes from a much deeper place because I know that the world becomes a smaller, darker, grimmer place when someone like Robert dies. He was a wonderful human being who cheerfully lifted up the spirits of the people around him with the remarkable way that he lived his life.

Dr. Whitton and I met on the first day of classes during my freshman year at Davidson. It was August of 2001. Thinking about that time is like traveling to an alien world. 9/11 was still two weeks away, I was going to become a famous physicist, and Saddam Hussein was just another dictator on the news. As soon as Robert introduced himself, I knew that I would like him. He was warm, effusive, and loved to laugh. In addition to his many personal qualities he was also a gifted teacher and was equally at home in the classroom with advanced students or avowed math-phobes. His joy for teaching left a mark on generations of Davidsonians.

Robert and I went on to do an independent study in Differential Geometry during my sophomore year. We joked over coffee about metric tensors, vector valued functions, and things that I can't even pronounce or remember how to define. In short, we enjoyed each other's company. I eventually chose to become a Spanish major, join the Army, and deploy to Afghanistan. With time and distance we heard from each other less and less, but I thought of him frequently. We reconnected eagerly when I came home to Davidson in 2009 to give a talk about my experiences in combat. The two of us sat down under one of the big white oaks by the track and talked about life. He had the same twinkle in his eye as always, and he seemed to understand my decision to enlist much easier than most of my professors, family, and friends.

In the days since his death, I have searched for meaning in the senseless tragedy that took him away from us. So far that meaning has eluded me. Instead I find memories of his hospitality on the evenings when he would open his doors to us for good food and conversation. It was on such an evening that the two of us sat down in his living room to pour over his personal library. Robert was a great lover of music and poetry, and he eagerly showed me his prized early edition of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Coleridge's final lines make more sense to me now than ever before. We will miss you Robert.

...
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone; and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1108549 2011-11-23T14:01:15-05:00 2012-01-23T05:12:01-05:00

Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/ Some have argued that this outburst of brutality is the result of a decade of creeping militarization of police departments. There is something to this argument and it is reflected in the difficulty in distinguishing between the uniforms, weaponry, and popular publications for police officers and the same equipment and literature that are produced for soldiers. However, even the most over-equipped and on-edge police officers will only abuse their power to harm civilians if they believe that their chain of command will support their actions. In other words, these events happen because of the absolute failure of moral leadership by people like Chancellor Katehi of UC Davis, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna of the NYPD, and the mayors of Portland, Oakland, Seattle, and other cities.

Various media outlets carried coverage of Dep. Insp. Bologna's rampage during the week of September 24th, but this material has recently been replaced by even more outrageous images from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Seattle. These images may become iconic, however they also fail to tell the full story of the officers who conduct themselves with integrity or the utterly spineless behavior of the elites who hold ultimate responsibility for this draconian response to peaceful demonstrators.

We have entered the Twilight Zone. When our soldiers who daily put their lives on the line make weak excuses for violence against innocent civilians, we readily admit that they should be fired and the world eagerly roasts them on the spit of public opinion. Life is tough, we say, and soldiers have to be held accountable for their mistakes. True. However, when the chancellors of UC Davis and UC Berkeley, NYPD spokesmen, and various mayors make morally bankrupt decisions on American soil and follow them with flaccid remarks that seem to defend the use of brutality, they all keep their jobs. Where is our outrage against the use of police violence to silence protest on our own soil? Surely we don't reserve our righteous indignation for abuses by our own soldiers overseas, or regimes like Egypt, Syria, and Yemen?

Ethical leadership is not some kind of an abstract construct that we can't apply to our everyday lives. In this security obsessed world of ours it is more important than ever. A lack of ethical leadership by civilians and soldiers is exactly what led to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. At one point or another it affected nearly every kind of decision that I had to make as a platoon leader in Afghanistan. If I was seen as softening my stance on ethical standards in the platoon, then my soldiers would find unpleasant ways to test my limits. The same applied to my commander. We had to keep a tight leash on both ourselves and our subordinates to keep our unit on the straight and narrow. That balance of judicious use of real violence with extreme care to avoid unnecessarily harming civilians or their property was the challenge of a lifetime. When I see UC Davis police officers in riot gear spraying seated students in the face with mace, it is clear that neither they nor their superiors have even tried to live up to the ethical challenge that we demand of our soldiers who work and live in much more difficult positions.

More troubling than these patent failures of ethical leadership is the way that the images of continuing violence against protest movements in the Middle East are now much harder to separate mentally from the actions taken by local government leaders on American soil. This is not to say that there is no difference between the United States and countries like Iran that are unashamed to murder innocent protestors. If I believed that were true, I would never have put on a uniform to defend the United States. It is love and patriotism that move me to say that we are better than the events of recent weeks, and as a community we need to demand leaders who understand the moral complexities of their positions. So far no innocent civilians have been gunned down by police breaking up one of the Occupy protests in an American city. And technically pepper spray and tear gas don't usually cause permanent injury to people who don't have asthma or an unlucky allergy. But do we really want to admit that we've set the bar that low?



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Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/
My confusion at their appreciation led me to ask myself a question that should weigh heavily on all of us on Veterans Day: what does it mean to thank someone for their service?

The easy answer is that it depends. We can always poke fun at politicians who use "supporting the troops" as a political football. But when people truly mean what they say, somehow it isn't as easy to know how to respond. There were dozens of kindergarteners and second graders who sent my platoon cookies and cards while we were overseas. We received letters and gear from complete strangers, and when I returned home to visit my mom people would anonymously pay our bill in restaurants.

How can we repay that kind of random, heartfelt generosity?

I have been floored by the appreciation of the men and women who lived the stories of war that filled my history books as a child. The generosity of schoolchildren, restaurant patrons, and secret-Santas from all over America kept me from slipping into cynicism in the mountains of Afghanistan.

On Veterans Day we honor the hard work and sacrifice of the entire veteran community. That support means different things to different people, but it means more than you know.

Thanksgiving is at its best when tempered with the sincerity and humility that I have seen in those who supported me. Thank you.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.868188 2011-05-28T09:31:33-04:00 2011-07-28T05:12:01-04:00

Kevin Bell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-bell/
As it turned out, the hand of God intervened and the helicopter that was scheduled to take me back to my dusty home in the mountains left without me. This was like salt in a very deep wound. I hadn't realized how badly I needed to be at the memorial service. Now, my last memories of Deysie would forever be associated with the smell and sight of blood, and of the Blackhawk that bore his flag-shrouded body up the western branch of the valley and into the sunset. If I had been able to go to his memorial, there's no way to know what would have happened. I might have broken down in tears in front of my men. More likely, I could have bungled my words, or worse, just said something bland and forgettable about the remarkable young infantrymen who had died.

I've reflected on PFC Deysie almost daily in the years since his death. The pressure of a thousand days and nights of these thoughts, regrets, hopes and dreams has been overwhelming at times. But it has also renewed my spiritual life with a newfound urgency. I can never again live a day ungratefully. For a few terrifying moments, I believed that I had been the one struck by the grenades, and that I was dying. But Deysie's courage saved me. A lesser man would have ducked down in the turret, and the explosion probably would have killed everyone in the vehicle. But he wasn't that kind of soldier. I will always remember that my present enjoyment of life has been made possible only through the debt of blood paid for me by another. There can be no meaningless and empty days ahead of me. Each morning is an unexpected gift. Thank you for this Deysie.

I want you to know that we never forgot you. We remembered you in small ways by wearing your name on our wrists every day. I wear it still in spite of the uncomfortable questions that it sometimes invites. We also marked your courage by building a new base named in your honor. Our platoon spent months pounding pickets for the wire perimeter, and planning the grounds for the new outpost. I'm sure you remember the high cliffs surrounding "Ambush Alley." Combat Outpost Deysie now protects the vehicles that travel through that haunted stretch of road. I hope that your soul has found peace and comfort in the embrace of our Lord, and that our thoughts and prayers have sweetened for you the cool breezes of Heaven. My greatest wish is that you may be honored and pleased with what we have done with your name on our tongues in the last three years.

Of course, we know that there are millions of heroes to remember and revere on this Memorial Day, and more of our men and women in uniform will give up their lives before the war is over. Only last fall two more of my soldiers were killed in a bomb-blast in Afghanistan. This time I was in the United States, and was asked to speak at the funeral service for SPC Anthony Vargas. Nothing can prepare anyone to try to console a grieving mother and father at such a time, and so I ask the Lord to be gentle with the grief-stricken in their time of sorrow. I pray that the families of the fallen may find peace in their turmoil, and consolation in the terrific courage of their loved ones. I pray that my men, and all who are still serving overseas can come home to their families whole in body and mind. May the souls of the departed reach the abode of everlasting peace in the arms of God, and may we honor them with our determination and love. Amen.
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