Milblog Reflection

I have believed from the start that the war in Iraq is misplaced aggression from a president eager to prove himself worthy and not a blithering idiot. My opinion still stands today, regardless of the milblog and its entries. The milblog has changed my view of the war but in a different way. Before this class I never really never thought about the soldiers involved in this mess. I mean, I knew there were citizens over in Iraq carrying out a madman’s wishes, but I never really connected the implications of this. I knew people were dying there almost on a daily basis, but I never had a face to correlate with the number. In this way the milblog has opened my eyes to a whole new but strikingly similar culture.

The thing that I noticed from the beginning about these soldiers is how amazingly similar they are to the average, everyday, mainland American. They play video games, they write, they joke, surf the net, etc. In a big way this is a wakeup call for me. Seeing how similar these people are to me caused me to question, “What if I was in the army?” I never thought about this before because I always thought that it took a different, disconnected sort of person to join the army, but that is not the case. A lot of these people have close family and relatives that miss them; they are not disconnected. They just see a certain appeal to the army that most do not. There is the money, healthcare, free meals, free lodging, the regimented lifestyle, and even fitness that the army offers that could all appeal to a person. Heck, if I was not worried about having to stay or die, the army would appeal to me.

I guess that my point is that I now know there are actual people fighting there, not robots of people. Whether they are fighting for a just cause or not, I support them, not the cause. What they fight for is the love of this country and patriotism and the right to have it. For this, I admire them because while I love this country, I would never fight for that cause. I would fight for the soldiers, though.