( From Mike Walker, Col. USMC, retired)
All,
From what I know, Senator Obama is a likeable and honorable man. He is intelligent, eloquent, and has the gift of a real leader in his ability to connect personally with his followers. But for all these strengths, I cannot support his candidacy for I am Marine veteran of the Iraq war and that makes all the difference.
My experience in the war in Iraq has left bad memories, tragic memories, and even horrific memories. This is to be expected as war is always a terrible thing. But they are neither the only memories nor the most important.
I will never forget arriving at the outskirts of Irbil in August 2003 after leaving Baghdad earlier in the day. It was just as the sun was setting and we pulled off onto an open field to finalize the link-up with our unit there.
Suddenly the children who had been playing soccer began to come our way. Soon we were mobbed by these Iraqi children. They were shouting and laughing and running about yelling “Americans, Americans!” We needed the parents to make a way for us through the waving crowd so we could get back on the road. It was a moving experience and one of those moments that changes your life forever.
I also vividly remember meeting with a large group of Iraqis who were trying to partner with a number of NGO’s in the late spring of 2004 to take the first steps towards building the new Iraq. They had come from all over the nation. They were Sunni and Shi’a, Arab and Kurd. The term they universally used to describe the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was “The Liberation.”
And I remember dining with a senior government official from al Anbar province in July 2004. He was a former Ba’athist and Sunni Arab. He described how he had been arrested by Saddam’s security forces and then savagely beaten and forced to live for six months in a bare concrete cell, in total darkness, that was so designed as to ensure that one could never stand up completely or stretch out when lying down to an uneasy rest.
But he did not dwell on the past. That night, his eyes were aglow with energy and vitality as he spoke to us with real passion of about the future of al Anbar. We had given back to him, and to hundreds of thousands like him, something that Saddam had taken away. We had given him back an indispensable and priceless commodity. We had given him back hope.
If you ask the Senator and his code-pink adherents whether or not they expect to erase my personal history of the war in Iraq, my memories of the smiling children, of liberation and of hope for Iraq, by supplanting them with a message of failure and despair, of cutting and running, their answer is a resounding chorus of:
YES, WE CAN!
YES, WE CAN!
YES, WE CAN!
Well Senator, for this Marine, the answer is and will always be:
NO, YOU CAN’T.
Semper Fi,
Mike
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