Commentary: More war, more marble markers at West Point

[unhappycamper]

Commentary: More war, more marble markers at West Point
By Joseph L, Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009

WEST POINT, N.Y. — Wet snow blankets the Military Academy Cemetery deep enough to discourage my usual trooping of the long, sorrowful line of headstones of those graduates who died in Vietnam.

They're in line along the back fence, these young men of the Classes of 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 and on and on and on. They were lieutenants and captains and even a few majors. They did their duty. They followed the orders of Kennedy or Johnson or Nixon or even Gerald Ford.

They fought and died for duty, honor and country, as have so many others of the long gray line who rest here or in Arlington or in other National Cemeteries across this land.

The sheer numbers of their marble markers along that back fence, the length of that line to be trooped and reviewed, never fails to bring me to tears — hot, bitter tears at the sacrifice they made so willingly for a war so wrong, so futile.

Last week a new President, Number 44, came here to West Point and with the 4,000 cadets of this institution as his backdrop announced he was escalating the war in Afghanistan, adding another 30,000 American troops to the nearly 70,000 already there.


Rest of article at: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/340/story/80427.html

[Lost Jaguar]

1. Need I remind my friends here...

...that Mr. Galloway is the journalist present at the battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam, so long ago? He's the co-author of "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young." In a bizarre coincidence, the man depicted on the cover of the first edition of that book, the exhausted soldier holding the M16, bayonet fixed, is Rick Rescorla, one of the dead heroes of the World Trade Center tragedy many years later. And yet, Mr. Galloway feels no urgency to subdue the Taliban--perhaps because he has seen the perils of involvement in an "assymetrical" war. Few can speak with as much authority as he of the futility of the president's plan.

[TexasObserver]

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