This one's about the war in Afghanistan.

     I was going to do another entry of my Rules to Live By (I like to imagine that in a giant, echoing bass voice when I hear that in my mind) and then take a little detour into my recent test in Aikido.  Instead I decided to do talk about the war in Afghanistan.  I'm not going into how our government's recent obvious reluctance to do anything about the attacks on our embassies (and the deaths of our personnel stationed in them) have only served to embolden our enemy and increase their actions in-theater and around the rest of the world.  Nor am I going to talk about how both the president and Mr. Romney (as well as all of the U.S. news agencies) are avoiding saying anything about the terrible loss of VMA 211.  My friend ASM826, who writes the blog Random Acts of Patriotism (click the little link to the right of this post where it says blogs I follow), did an excellent job of covering that and I strongly recommend that anyone reading this also read his entry for 23SEP2012.  Then ask yourself why that information has been covered by all the papers and TV stations in the U.K.--but not anywhere here in the U.S.
     Instead, I am going to talk a little bit about math, particularly the math of war.  Math is great because it is very simple and always works the same way.  One number is either greater, smaller, or equal to another.  The number I want to talk about today is 2000.  That is the number of casualties--the number of our warriors killed by the enemy's warriors--we have taken since the war in Afghanistan began on 7OCT2001.  That means that we have had two thousand of our people killed in the last eleven years.  You can Google charts for how many each year, but that is an average of 200 people per decade, or about 182 people killed per year.
     Here's some more numbers.
     The American Revolution (1775-1783) cost us about 25,700 of our soldiers.  That means we lost about 3,212 people per year.
     In World War I (1914-1918) we lost over 116,000 of our troops.  That one cost us 29,000 people per year.
     World War II (1941-1945) U.S. casualties topped 400,000.  That's around 100,000 of our people per year.
     The Vietnam War (1955-1975) cost us a little over 58,000 lives, which is about 2,900 people per year.
     The war in Iraq (2003-2011) cost 4477 deaths, or close to 560 people per year.
     I think everyone can see where I am going with this, but I will spell it out anyway.   The loss of even a single person in war is a tragedy, but these were the lives of warriors.  Ultimately, when they take the oath to defend our nation, this is what those words could cost the men and women who speak them.
     It is the job of politicians to start wars.  It is the job of warriors to end them.  It is a betrayal of their loyalty to make them fight with their hands tied, by exposing them to the enemy through political wrangling and party bickering over the war budget, or by setting or adhering to politically inspired and irrational combat objectives like our troop draw downs and exit strategy for this war.  I consider it errant, traitorous stupidity to blatantly cooperate with enemy sympathizers such as Pakistan--just as it is equally foolish to ignore for political purposes the main instigator and supplier of resources that has kept this conflict going for so long--by which I mean the nation of Iran.
     Two thousand dead is a terrible loss--as a former Marine and a combat veteran I know this better than most.  I can understand their fears, anger, and frustration over this war.  Therefor, when I write these words it is not callousness but rather my understanding of the math of war which inspires my words.  Simply put, our losses compared to those of other conflicts are minimal, almost infinitesimal by comparison.  The men and women we have fighting today are the best trained and equipped that our nation has ever produced.  I believe that it would be a terrible disservice to them, as well as a much greater tragedy, to lose yet another conflict through the cowardly wranglings of corrupt Washington politicians and the apathy of a misinformed public that is apparently blind to how much they are being manipulated by the media.
     If our warriors--who are even now still fighting and dying for us despite all this--have not lost heart and still have the courage and will to see this fight through to the end...why can't we as a nation do the same?

This one's about underwear.

     It's been a while since I made a post.  That's because I am lazy.  Anyway, here's a new one.  I recently noticed that my girlfriend (or whatever the latest PC term is so I don't get bullied by any feminists, you all know how frail and delicate I am) got one of those underwear catalogs in the mail.  I looked through it, because I have a Y chromosome, but that wasn't the only reason.  Just most of it.  As you might expect, it was full of scantily clad models trying to look alluring.  What mystified me about the whole thing was this: we were all children once, and experienced the joys and wonders of Christmas and birthdays and so on--so since then...how the hell did the wrapping become more important than the present?