SAD TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO

“Sad to say I told you so” would probably be the same words I could say to my brother in-law today. We were driving in his car in upstate New York and there were people lining each side of the road with signs saying “Honk, if you don’t want war”. I said “Aren’t you going to honk?” He said “no, because Sodom Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and we need to keep America safe.” I told him that Iraq had no WMD’s and they are not the ones responsible for what happened on September 11^th and I wanted him to remember that I told him this.  I had seen on television the grainy films that Colin Powell had shown to the United Nations Assembly as supposed proof that we should go into Iraq and get rid of the danger to the United States.

Our grandson in his senior year in high school removed his jacket at dinner where all our children and grand-children were celebrating Christmas Eve. He showed us the Marine T-shirt he was wearing, telling about twenty of us that he had signed-up and would attend boot camp at Parris Island after graduation. He was so happy to tell us and we all cheered for him, but also cried. He told us he would probably be sent to Japan after basic training.

The family also cried when we attended his graduation ceremony on Parris Island.  It was a very moving experience.  There were signs everywhere which said “support our troops”. I told our grandson that although we were against the war, it didn’t mean we did not support our troops. He said he knew that.

War came and he was sent to Iraq. He was stationed in Fallujah where in this different kind of war, he held his cell-phone in the air, so his mother could hear the flak going over his head and listen to the sound of war all around him

Every day, we saw pictures on the front page of our newspapers of Marines in their dress uniforms that were reported killed in action. The majority of them were 18 years of age and they all looked like our grandson and we cried at their loss.

Jeff spent a full year in the combat zone and now would be coming home. We were attending the Florida State Fair with his mother, when she got a call from Jeff saying he was back in the USA. We all hugged and cried.

To date, the estimates of persons killed in the war in Iraq go from 150,000 to over 1.2 million as a result of direct and indirect warfare.