You Can't Win For Losing

For just the sheer unadulterated pointlessness of it all, this one takes the cake. There are no absolutes. There is no right and wrong. Not fighting a war or sending someone to get their head blown off, that really sounds like a good thing. But not if you were counting on this as an opportunity? And I'm not being sarcastic, I can totally see how you could be mega-bummed about changing all your plans around to go to Afghanistan and now you're not going, but ultimately war solves nothing, right? Peace is the goal.

But war provides a war economy, and that's better than what we have otherwise. There's plenty of money to be made on war. But we are still supposed to at least TRY to have peace, right? Or should we root for an uprising somewhere so we can send these guys in and they won't be bummed out? Can't they shovel snow this winter? Clear up some power lines? I'm totally confused, but I am still going to root for peace because I'm old and this is what I was taught.

This proves once and for all that doing the right thing is IMPOSSIBLE. You send these guys off to war and they get killed, and when you don't send them that sucks too. And you can't even count on WAR. Wars end. We lurch from temporary solution to lame temporary solution before we finally get down to the brass tacks of soldiers and ammo, and then just when we get it going good we pull the plug for peace and these guys are stuck doing nothing. Hopeless.

Maybe a full-time low scale war is the answer. As I'm writing this it occurs to me, peace never lasts. People really NEED war. It's a primal thing. And what we get is the spiraling vortex of war, peace, war, peace, misery, war, peace, war, war, peace for awhile, misery, war, peace, peace, war, Frank Sinatra, peace, war and it just never ends. So let's get it under control. A full-time war with very few, if any, casualties. More like keeping busy and firing a few rounds here and there, but analyzing everybody's movements and sending a lot of people all around the world just in case. And some poor countries could host the war for a fee and that would keep THEM going. Whoever is campaigning with a better idea I challenge them to come forward RIGHT NOW and match my full-time low scale war idea. You ask me for "out of the box" thinking and here it is. But it is hopeless because you people don't know what the hell you want anyway.

Two months ago, Demetries Luckett left his job in Michigan, turned in his cable box, sent his daughter to live with her mother, and headed for Camp Shelby in Mississippi.

As a 1st lieutenant in Michigan's National Guard, he was being deployed to Afghanistan.

But just a month after he arrived for training, the Army decided Uncle Sam didn't need him after all.

Now Luckett's unemployed and back home in Harper Woods, Mich. — a victim of the Obama administration's ongoing effort to pull at least 33,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by next fall.

Unlike active-duty soldiers who are stationed at U.S. military bases across the country and can be sent on a moment's notice to a conflict anywhere in the world — the nation's citizen soldiers have civilian jobs and lives they have to set aside when they get those deployment notices.

And unlike active-duty soldiers, Guard members may have little to go back to, if their country changes its mind.

Luckett is not alone.

In the last 60 days, as many as 8,900 Army National Guard soldiers were either sent home early from Iraq or Afghanistan, or were told that the Pentagon's plans to send them to war had either been shelved or changed. As a result, U.S. military and Guard leaders have been scrambling to find alternative missions for many of the soldiers — particularly those who had put their lives and jobs on hold and were depending on the deployment for their livelihood.

"If you're a 25-year-old infantryman, and you're a student at Ohio State University, and you decide not to register for school in July because you were going to mobilize, and we say your services aren't needed anymore — that becomes a significantly emotional event in that person's life," said Col. Ted Hildreth, chief of mobilization and readiness for the Army National Guard.

[Associated Press]