A Mom Speaks Out on Her Daughter's Tour of Duty in Iraq

My daughter served two tours of duty in the recent Iraq war and thank heavens made it home safely. She was "liberating the Iraqi citizens" as she put it, which sounded more like a sound bite than how people normally feel or talk about any war. Anyone who has served time in the military and especially on the battle field will confirm that your mind, thoughts and memory are literally held captive and totally focused on the tasks at hand. Once you leave the military to go back to civilian life, you try as hard as you can to put what happened there behind you and out of your mind.

Call it a kind of self-preservation of sanity, or way of coping with Post Traumatic Stress the best way you can, but however you define it one thing is for sure, you cannot forget ever what things you saw there, what actions you took there, and what training was drilled into your psyche (killing, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, following orders, etc.) Women especially are treated differently, not only by the U.S. in a military setting, but particularly as foreigners in a foreign country where the oppression of women has existed for centuries and may actually arise out of some kind of religious indoctrination to oppress. For example, demanding what kind of clothing can be worn or behaviors are allowed around town during off-duty hours.

Women in the military are particularly affected by trauma not only during times of "liberation of the Iraqis" but as a result of simply serving as a woman minority among hundreds of men in the most stressful of military environments. Many woman have reported being assaulted, harassed or otherwise manipulated by fellow officers. The New York Times Magazine did a wonderful article on March 18, 2007, written by Sara Corbett outlining these very special needs and concerns of military women.

Although my own daughter may not have shared the abuse many of these women went through while serving in Iraq, she most certainly was deeply affected by the fact that she had not only witnessed the killing of others, but had done so herself while under military command. War is not pretty, clean or even orderly - people die horrible deaths - but this is the price military people are willing to pay to "liberate" others and protect our country's freedoms.

Congress is now deciding whether to continue advancing the war in Iraq forward. I would say that before this decision can be made, the U.S. needs to decide where its priorities lie. If continuing the military mission is paramount, then the country needs to brace itself for the costs of such a military endeavor - not only in dollars and cents, but lives and how those lives or loss of lives affect everyone around them. We should have learned this already the hard way by veterans of World War II, Korea, Cambodia and Vietnam - war is costly and lengthy. The concern is not only for the U.S. military personnel's personal costs, but the Iraqi military and government officials' costs also.

Perhaps if more interest were shown by capitalistic or corporate sponsors to "liberate" and reconstruct in Iraq (where are the Muslim and neighboring countries' business people?), the military would have less to do. Why the U.S. has not tapped into the spoils of this war, in particular the oil or land, is a mystery to me - what happened to economic incentive?. If the terrorists spent their time more fruitfully earning a living, making their own communities safer, cleaner and wiser, all sides Sunni and Shia would not feel the absolute necessity to kill others or have any outside forces "liberate" them.

When killing is the main focus, no one really wins and that goes for the ones who die and the ones who took other lives as well....they have to live with that on their conscience for the rest of their life - even if they felt their cause was just. Like the Biblical story of brothers Cain and Abel - the undeserved dead one is still just that, dead, and no longer can serve any good to the U.S., Iraq, to Osama Bin Laden, to God or this world.