pray for our troops
Mood:  down
Now Playing: breaking benjamin
Topic: Friends and Family
One of my buddies in the blogging community, Colonel Mustard is stationed in Iraq. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past day and a half, you've heard about the horrific attack in Mosul. Col was a regular here on Tripod until a few weeks ago when he went over to Mindsay... anyway, here are some excerpts from an entry that he made today:

I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know why I am here anymore and I have no idea what I am doing. I woke up this morning devoid of all emotion, I feel neither anger nor pain, joy or sorrow. My desires, hopes and ambitions now appear meaningless. I lack even the remotest sense of self and everything is now numb. The ringing in my ears the only knowledge I have that I am still alive, nothing else even really bothers to register. Except for perhaps the images tattooed right on to my psyche of the finality of yesterday afternoon.

If I am not making any sense, or rather just rambling, you will forgive me, if you don't I doubt I would care either way. Will I ever care about anything ever again? We lost 6 people yesterday. 6 faces I will never see again. I can't even see them now...People you saw every day, worked with, lived with, laughed with, argued with in some cases, especially this head case...but not anymore.

My heart just flew kamakazie into the abyss and now I am just an empty shell where a soul used to be, however tattered and tarnished it was, it was mine, and now it is gone.

If I were able to I'd be crying right now, but I suppose that requires emotion and feeling, something with which I am now lacking.


This is the second time in the past month that the war has seemed too close for comfort. If that makes sense. I'm not sure how to really describe it. Yes, I knew that there were people over there that I knew -- some mere acquaintances, others being friends, either old or new. I worried about them, but never thought that anything bad would happen. I read the latest casualty reports in Iraq... I see how old they were. There is another site with more information, sometimes photographs and backgrounds.

At any rate, with all that being said, it still seemed like it was far away from me... no one that I knew had been injured or killed. Then Kyle comes home and kills himself, and now I find from Col Mustard's firsthand experience how awful it is over there. I knew it was bad, but.......? I don't really know that to think about all of this anymore. It seems that none of our soldiers are getting the help that they need, whether that means some kind of psychological preparation for war, or even having the right supplies and equipment. What is the right solution? We can't just pull out, can we? There will probably be civil war either way, so what should we do? Is there anything that we can do? Saddam might have been a threat, yes, but he's out now, so what now?

what is this world coming to?