Dear Nadine, Rough Cut and Michael,
Thank you so much for your respective concerns over my inability to adjust, to get over my feelings about Vietnam and for my being stuck in a cocoon.
Your voices join in a wonderful chorus almost too beautiful to hear. I.e.;
Nadine, "I said that for you it was all about Vietnam, and all about your feelings, and the situation in Iraq was just about irrelevant to the discussion..."
Michael, "I would add that guys on the right have not made it easy for Ed to adjust."
And Rough Cut, "I protested the Vietnam war and some of the establishments of the era, some people went and fought in the Vietnam war ... when it was over most of us moved on to a different time. Some guys, like Ed, couldn't. They were either way too insulted by us protesters or they went to the other extreme to try to make up for something they later decided was a bad choice. That's where Ed is stuck...Maybe someday he will emerge from his cocoon with something propitious to offer..."
After reading your caring posts I almost got a little misty eyed. Here I am, in an emotional state, unable to adjust, stuck forever in larvae stage and incapable of morphing into a wonderful butterfly that could fly, fly away on golden wings. It's almost too sad to ponder.
If I hadn't been in Vietnam maybe I'd have been right about Iraq, Like you three. I might have been able to prognosticate the many successes along the way. Things like the narrow breadth of the doomed insurgency that was only Al Queda and a handful of Saddam "dead enders," the import of the capture of Saddam, the wonderful constitution that "freed" the women of Iraq from male and Muslim tyranny, that beautiful, purple fingered day when Iraq emerged as a beacon for democracy in the middle east, the utter falsity of the story that Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire and that the Army covered it up, the self evident truth that freedom is a god given right and that free men don't attack their neighbors, and, of course, I'd be able to perceive the utter nobility that's driven our involvement in Iraq.
How could I have been so wrapped up the emotions of Vietnam, so mal adjusted; no, even worse, cocooned, that I didn't recognize the rightness of George Bush's words and, sadly, the reverberating words of the three of you.
You didn't help, Micheal, when you turned against the war, but I'm not blaming you. After all, you made several turns and I could have chosen any of the "right" ones.
No, the problem is mine, and mine alone.
Like so many of the other combat "post Vietnam defeatists," you've identified, I've aided and abetted the enemy by undermining the "will" of the American people. But if we have the "will" no one can stop us, not even the people who have to see it our way for it to work. Yes, tragically I've been lost.
On a personal note, maybe one of you would lend your psychiatric or psychological expertise to helping me. You all seem to have a clear understanding of how it is that so many of us combat veterans are incapable of seeing the world in it's true form.
You could make the time. Dammit, I need your help. Surely you could spare a little time from helping the Iraqi people to help ME!
But, I warn you, you may have to petition the State Home to get in here cause they keep me isolated. The state won't even pay for a computer and I have to write everything out with crayons and then Ruprick puts my notes in sealed baggies and smuggles them out in the slop buckets. They never think to look there even though they keep saying, "That Ed, he's talking shit again." He he he, guffaw, guffaw, I laugh every time they say that but they just stare and shake their heads.
So...SAVE ME...!!!
I want to be like you three. I want to help the Iraqis more. I want to support our soldiers better. I want your record of being right. I want to "emerge from [my] cocoon with something propitious to offer."
Send me a note and Ruprick will slip it in a baloney sandwich and get it through.
Ed,
State Home
22 Mean Street
Bumfuck Texas, 911911
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