Saving Sgt. Ryan: A father's sacrifice - Putting a human face on the need to end the Iraq war

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7608

Saving Sgt. Ryan: A father's sacrifice - Putting a human face on the need to end the Iraq war
by Jaime O'Neill | May 22 2007


— first published in the San Francisco Chronicle

snip//

Kahlor is still on active duty in Germany, and though he has survived four direct assaults on tanks he'd been riding in, and come through a number of other close calls, it's still possible he'll be sent back to Iraq in August. Kahlor didn't come through those four attacks unscathed. He's suffered traumatic brain injury and compressed vertebrae in his back. Those injuries have not been deemed serious enough to exclude him from the prospect of yet another tour of duty.

"Those four attacks he was in were just the ones in 2006," his father says. "I don't know the half of it, because he doesn't tell me everything, and you never can get much out of the Army. They diagnose the injuries, and then your status rides on how that diagnosis got made. From what I understand about Vietnam, if you got wounded, you got sent home, but it's not like that now."

To say that his father worries about his son is a tremendous understatement. Tim Kahlor compares his daily dread to a never-ending prom night, when your kid is out driving for the first time and you're waiting by the phone at 3 a.m. In Tim Kahlor's world, and in the world of all those military parents who wait by their phones, it's always 3 a.m. on prom night.

"All that time my son was in Iraq," he says, "I'd hear something on the news about soldiers killed in Iraq, and I'd wonder if it's my son. At home, when a car came down our street, I always feared it might be someone coming to tell me that my kid was dead."

snip//

"I look at my son," Kahlor says, "and he's all banged up, but there are so many who have suffered so much more than my son has. We've got to quit returning the same soldiers and Marines over and over."

He brushes away a tear. "I'm still amazed Ryan has survived. You can only run across the freeway so many times without getting hit."

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[Monkeyman]

1. K&R

[MikeNearMcChord]

2. Christ!! It is time for a new underground railroad

He has no business going back, nor any others who have more than one tour unless they want to go back! And for the Democrats in congress to cave to the mad emperor Shrubous Boobious Maximus SHAME!!!