SAGINAW GENEALOGICAL SOCIETYFROM SHARED KNOWLEDGE
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SPEAKER INFOTUESDAY, 9 APRIL
2024 Donna Carlevato will present:
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This meeting was hosted by Debra Sheets for her speaker GINGER OGILVIE, who taught us all about
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DID YOU KNOWROOTSTECH VIDEOS...
How long will RootsTech sessions be available on the website after the conference? We will keep most of the classes and keynotes from RootsTech up on our sister site THE HISTORY KEY, for approximately three years. Most classes will be available until the THE FOLLOWING YEAR'S conference. SO...Where do I go to watch them? Well, Check it out below! DID YOU ALSO KNOWThere is ONE safe place to store all your photos and stories... FOREVER.Safely stored 600 ft. underground. And also
duplicated inside YET another mountain. Yeah...We got you covered! FamilySearch.org is a non-profit and totally free! MILITARY SERVICE: CIVIL WARSix Steps To Find Your Civil War Veterans and Their Regiments
To get the most out of Civil War Stories, you need to know who in your tree might have a story! We show you how in just 6 steps to find those people. MILITARY RECORDS:MILITARY RECORDS-ANCESTRY.COM
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YOU MAY FIND HELP HERE FOR YOUR SEARCH! YOUR GENEALOGY NEEDS MET AT YOUR LOCAL FSC!WE are the FamilySearch Center, sponsored by the CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, an international organization dedicated to helping ALL people worldwide discover their family story.
ARE you looking for help in YOUR Family tree? HERE, you will be shown how to begin a FREE TREE that will be placed online for any of your family members to help share more information about your deceased ancestors. That will enable family around the world to easily retrieve and use this information in search of their family members. FOR over twenty years FamilySearch.org has helped millions of families gather their ancestors. Since it's inception, on May 24, 1999. There are now over 7 million page views each day on www.FamilySearch.org YOU can contribute towards finding your family by starting a FREE ONLINE TREE and gathering and documenting your family for your loved ones. ALWAYS, at FamilySearch we believe connections to our family members, past-present-and-future, can be a source of great joy that helps us to understand our own personal identity and may even help us overcome some of our own challenges in life. WE WANT TO HELP YOU save and share your FAMILY MEMORIES before it’s too late, and they disappear, never to be found again. IT'S FREE, IT'S EASY AS... 1,2,3 ! OR CALL FOR ONLINE HELP AT:
FamilySearch open 24 hrs./7 days a week! 1-866-604-1830 WHERE HISTORY HOLDS THE KEY! This is a FREE website that promotes self learning. If you want to start a FREE Family Tree on FamilySearch, OR begin family research on Ancestry, or learn how to index records, then... THIS IS THE PLACE! And we also keep track of all the Rootstech videos for you to find RIGHT here. SO COME ON... Learn at HistoryKEY.org which also connects you to the 1950 census! Just click below. FRESHLY UPDATED JUST FOR YOU! WHAT'S ON THE TUBE?Want to know more about INDEXING?
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FOOD & FAMILYDid you know...family recipes are a tradition!?!
GO AHEAD...Make it with family! What food is most popular in
APRIL? Well, that would be anything associated with EASTER OR PASSOVER! There is only one thing you need to know about lamb... GET A MEAT THERMOMETER!
It’s the only way you can take the guesswork out of cooking lamb leg so it’s perfect blushing pink and ridiculously juicy inside. Because – and here’s something Aussies don’t like to talk about – lamb leg is actually very lean so if it’s not pink, it’s dry.... Full stop, end of story! MY MEAT THERMOMETER – For most of my adult life, I was using a $5 thermometer I got on Ebay which never failed me. A few years ago I finally decided it was time to invest in a real one so I got a Thermapen which is pretty well regarded as the best (my thoughts here). Even if you can’t invest in a Thermapen – it’s the 21st century, and even cheap tech isn’t so bad. Invest in a $5 meat thermometer. That’s a lot cheaper than a wasted, overcooked lamb leg! (OK, I do have a few more pointers.) THE PERFECT LEG OF LAMB “how to make the perfect roast lamb leg” tips! Garlic rosemary rub – classic lamb flavor's. Start on high to get the nice brown color going then lower heat. Roast on a bed of garlic (or onion). Make the gravy using the pan drippings. Roast lamb gravy is better than every other cut of meat – beef, chicken, pork, none of them compare! LAMB IS GREAT EVEN IF ITS NOT SPRING. What you need for roast lamb leg ...Starting with the hero ingredient – the lamb leg! Get the best you can afford – yes, meat is like wine, the more you pay, the better the quality. Quality of life of the animal also comes into play there. BTW: All that red ink you see stamped on the meat is perfectly safe to eat and actually, you only see it on better quality lamb. You don’t typically see it on supermarket lamb. CUT BONE? – Some (most?) butchers and almost all supermarkets sell lamb leg with the shank (bone) cut. Either fully cut off or partially cut so it folds. (This is simply for practical reasons – shelf storage and packing space.) For grandness, I like the bone intact. But it doesn’t matter, it’s purely a visual decision! RUB FOR ROAST LAMB LEG Here’s what you need for the rub: rosemary, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. Use fresh rosemary – dried is not the same! ROAST LAMB GRAVY All you need for gravy is flour for thickening and beef stock/broth for the liquid. You shouldn’t need extra salt for the gravy. I find the salt on the lamb that ends up in the pan drippings plus the salt in the beef stock is enough. (But taste and add more if you want!) Why beef rather than lamb stock? Well, there’s a reason lamb stock is not typically sold at grocery stores! It’s just very…lamby. Lamb fat is NOT like beef fat, its actually TALLLOW and when it is cooling off...well its not pleasant to be eating it. Rather eat it while its HOT! 🙂 Beef has a cleaner flavor. It doesn’t make the gravy taste beefy at all because there is so much lamb flavor from the drippings. Why not chicken stock? It works fine but the gravy color is paler. I like my gravy for roast lamb leg to be a really deep brown color! HOW TO MAKE ROAST LEG OF LAMB Rub with rosemary and garlic, roast in a hot oven to get the color going then continue at a lower temperature for 1 hour or until the internal temperature is 53°C/127°F (for blushing pink perfection). Rest for 20 minutes before carving. It will still be very warm even after 1 hour. Just don't let it get cold! NOW'S THE TIME TO GET THE VEGGIES AND POTATOES OFF THE STOVE! * A word of advice from an old shepherdess...I used to raise DORSET SHEEP, as they can have TWO lamb seasons. I kept my FALL lambs to be sold in the SPRING. That way they are about twice as big as Spring Lambs, but just as tender. I always had the butcher slice the leg of lamb into one inch thick slabs, then tie them all together. It roasts faster, it's pre-cut, and ready to serve, and one inch is just DELICIOUS!!! Enjoy IN MEMORY OF:NO ONE WE KNOW PASSED TODAY,
JUST REMEMBER YOUR FRIENDS, AND WE WOULD LIKE TO SAY... BE THEY TWO LEGGED OR FOUR A FRIEND IS A FRIEND, ANY OLE WAY! GENEALOGY THOUGHTSMILITARYAFGHANISTAN WAR STORIESThucydides, (thoo·si·duh·deez)
an Ancient Greek historian and general, once said: “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out and meet it.” WAR STORIES FROM AFGHANISTANTHE AFGHANISTAN WAR Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet because the military is an all-volunteer organization, it is also a relatively isolated sector of the U.S. population. As a result, comparatively few Americans have direct connections to military veterans or to the daily conduct of the wars in those countries. Veterans may decline to discuss their experiences of deployment for years following the events. Others wish only to talk among themselves, suspicious of civilian agendas or ignorance. A few will never talk about deployment, though they might think of it often. And then there are a few...
THIS CAN’T GO ON BY NATHAN BRADLEY Common sense dictates that a unit deploying from the west coast to Central Asia would fly west. However, military flights can’t fly over Russian or Chinese airspace, (even when disguised in the livery of contracted civilian airliners). So we flew east, first to Germany and then, finally, to Kyrgyzstan. We landed in the dark, and before we could board the buses to Manas Air Base, a Kyrgyz policeman had to board the aircraft and verify its contents. His Red Army-styled green uniform and monstrous cap gave me a jolt of instant recognition: we were in the former Soviet Union. Later, at Manas, we received a RULES BRIEF. There was a bar on post, but only permanent Air Force personnel could drink. Army personnel were not allowed alcohol at any time in the theater of war, and certainly not transient personnel like us. There were soldiers heading to Afghanistan and others heading home, and you could tell the difference by the cleanliness or disrepair of their uniforms. On TV screens throughout the facility you saw advertisements for upcoming morale events. You could go hiking and horseback riding in the Tien Shan Mountains. You could take cultural tours to Bishkek and eat in restaurants. You could watch a Kyrgyz rock band perform. That is, if you were permanently stationed there. If you were transient, you could eat, sleep and wait for your flight, wherever it might take you. THAT'S IT. Two days later, we boarded a three-hour flight destined for Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan. We landed late in the evening. Airmen filed us off the immense flight line and into a large tent. They told us we could not move on to our final destinations until we received mandatory Operation Enduring Freedom briefings—a class on improvised explosive devices and mines, a class on sexual assault prevention and a combined spiritual fitness and suicide prevention briefing, none of which would take place tonight. We’d sleep on cots in old oilcloth Army tents (with mercifully well-fueled heaters). Jet lag kept me awake. I left the tent and followed the signs to the dining facility: a gigantic convex structure, like a three-story Quonset hut, with at least fifty long tables inside. A head counter took your military ID at the door and scanned it. You could probably seat six hundred people inside, and there were four different lines for the meals at hand. It was a 'KBR' venture. At the time, they ran all of the life-support activities in Afghanistan. I had heard about them for years, and about their enormous government contract. My first meal in Afghanistan was roasted beef brisket; the portion of meat was cut for me by a KBR guy making three to five times the salary of an American soldier. All the stories were true: they had a self-service ice cream sundae bar, five different flavors of milk, all of it free. Everyone deployed to Afghanistan, always eats for free. I figured this couldn’t be the norm, and it wasn’t. As I’d find out later, Bagram was NOT Afghanistan. The next day, they bused us to a muddy field on the south side of the runway for our improvised explosive device awareness class. They showed videos, confiscated from insurgents, depicting Americans getting killed on mountain roads; vehicles exploded and rolled down the embankments, first responders were shot, all punctuated by insurgents screaming “Allahu Akbar!” They walked us around a massive dirt-floor hangar full of disarmed bombs cadged from the countryside, and they had constructed mock culverts like the ones on village roads. The instructors told stories. It was midwinter, and the cold SEVERLY penetrated our attention. Next: the sexual assault briefing. We drove to the Operation Enduring Freedom Chapel, on the north side of the runway, squarely in “downtown” Bagram on Disney Drive. Going counterclockwise around the base, the fence butted up against an Afghan village. The adobe houses looked the same as pueblos that I had seen as a kid in the desert southwest, with wooden ladders allowing access to roofs and windows. Kids were out flying kites and stomping around muddy fields. Boys ran alongside the bus and threw rocks, but they bounced off the wire fence separating them from us. Disney Drive, named after Specialist Jason A. Disney (according to a memorial plaque, he died there in February 2002 after being crushed by a piece of heavy equipment), was paved and lined by one sidewalk. Scrubby pine trees sprouted along huge drainage ditches. Afghan laborers stood on beat-up scaffolding lining massive concrete buildings. There were neat stacks of shipping containers, dozens of tidy rows of plywood houses, ancient Army tents, apartments built out of shipping containers and green security netting over fences topped by concertina wire. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the street; over 20,000 people lived at Bagram. Everyone in uniform was carrying a rifle, some very awkwardly. Civilians wore suits or sweatsuits. Flatbed trucks hauled dozens of turbaned Afghans perched in a low squat. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” played over the speakers of our old Blue Bird Bus, courtesy of the American Forces Network. In the distance was the stark, white rise of the Hindu Kush Mountains. A low cloud of smog hung nearby a sizable park of diesel generators built inside shipping containers, with rusty, filthy smokestacks protruding from the top. We passed the infamous prison, known to us as the BTIF, or Bagram Theater Internment Facility, and then a small shopping center with an Orange Julius and Dairy Queen stand, with small crowds of soldiers waiting in line. It was like my life had become an opening scene from a shitty war movie that would be filmed in the future. The sexual assault brief was regrettable (and infuriating in the sense that soldier-on-soldier rapes are common enough to warrant it). The spiritual fitness brief, given by an Army chaplain Lieutenant Colonel, told us how to cope with deployment: Do hobbies. Learn Guitar. Sign up for College coursework they chorused. But one of my soldiers had deployed to Zabul province in 2006 and spent an entire year living in mountain redoubts, eating bagged rations and dodging insurgent rockets, and he knew we were in for the same. He looked at me during the speech and whispered, “What the fxxx is this guy talking about, sir?” It took us four days to finally catch a flight to our final destination, a smaller airfield in the east. The next three months passed slowly. I was an infantryman stuck in a logistical job, and I only got to leave the base a very few times on very short trips. We conducted inventories with the unit we were replacing; since everybody now does one year deployments, all the heavy equipment, vehicles, communications systems and even weapons STAY in Afghanistan and get passed from owner to owner. You get about two weeks with the unit you’re replacing, and then they go home and you figure out from experience what they didn’t tell you. The Army calls it a “Relief in Place” and a “Transfer of Authority.” The unit that we replaced was atrocious. Their strategy for keeping civilians away from vehicles in a convoy was to throw rocks from their truck turrets to smash the windshields of people who got too close. The equipment that they handed off to us was so poorly maintained that we actually had to get our higher headquarters to open an investigation: weapons wouldn’t fire because of deeply embedded rust. Vehicles had been stripped for parts and left on blocks. Working vehicles were full of fetid trash and loose, unfired bullets. Inside a forty-foot container, I found over three hundred abandoned 120mm white phosphorus mortars. One of our companies departed to occupy their base in the far south. They signed for ten new vehicles, each valued at $1.2 million, and began the sixty-mile drive. It took them over a month. Behind American combat vehicles and mine-clearing engineer elements, hundreds of Afghan cargo trucks followed with containers full of American equipment. The convoy struck thirty-two roadside bombs in thirty hours and preemptively destroyed dozens more. Bombs ruined four of that company’s new vehicles--two burned to the ground. No Americans were badly hurt. However, five Afghan drivers were killed. In one case, after the convoy came to a halt, insurgents on motorcycles rode up to a truck that had pulled off to the side of the road, pulled out the driver, doused him in gasoline and set him on fire. They were gone before any of the American elements in the convoy received any word of what happened. Our brigade commander was furious that the convoy had been delayed and so much equipment had been lost. He called my battalion commander to say that something had to change. “Whatever you’re doing,” he said, “Do something different. THIS CAN'T GO ON. Otherwise, we’ll all lose our jobs.” I thought of these words when I tagged along on a mission to conduct a “battlefield hand-over.” The commando units near to us had captured a significant insurgent financier. We arrived at the compound where they had detained him while it was still dark. The sun would be up in an hour and the commandos would be leaving. They’d done their jobs well—absolutely no one was hurt, and they had segregated the suspect men from the family. I remember walking into the qalat through a blown-open door to find thirty women and children squatting on blankets. The inside courtyard smelled like wet straw and animals, and it was much smaller than I expected. Farm implements lay about the yard near an open-pit well. The grainy green imagery of the night vision made the children’s eyes look unnaturally wide and dilated; all around them were crackles of radio traffic in an unfamiliar language spoken by the armed men inside their home. They were visibly terrified. The commando leaders told my company commander what they had seen and done, and within ten minutes helicopters whisked the soldiers ALL away. After sunrise, I got a better picture. All the men were tied up and wearing blindfold hoods, and most were shirtless. They had been numbered with permanent markers, some of them on their heads and some of them on their bodies. It made it easier to make note of things: “Man number one had this in his possession. Number two, that.” And so on. This made sense tactically, but try explaining that to the recipient. The man of the house told us that we had the right guy. It was his business associate; who had asked the man for shelter. Pashtun hospitality would not let him refuse. But yes, he was involved. We took the owner around the house to make sure he noted any damage or theft from the raid. Clothes lay in piles on the floor where the commandos had dumped the rooms. The children’s bedroom had two-dozen backpacks hanging on the wall (Afghans have big families). The man saw no damage. He told our interpreters it was a lawful search and that he had NO complaints. We had no business with the women and children. Our Afghan National Police counterparts herded them back indoors to a room we had already searched, and we left them alone. One by one, we let the children come out to urinate. Most of them were very young. One boy, about thirteen, walked out and glanced at the tied-up men of the house, seeing them for the first time in the daylight. He then stared at me, tears in his eyes, looking hateful and nauseous. The insurgent financier, it turned out, was also a snitch on the payroll of the Afghan Intelligence Agency, the National Directorate of Security. He was released a few days later. The Brigade Commander WAS RIGHT...This can't go on. THOUGHT FOR THE DAYLIFE IS FULL OF CHANGE, GO WITH THE FLOW!
MILITARY SERVICE:WAS IT WORTH IT? ( You may not like his opinion)
By Ian Fritz
Ian was an airborne cryptologic linguist in the U.S. Air Force from 2008 to 2013, deploying twice to Afghanistan. "Was it worth it [for YOU]?" Or "Was it worth it [for us]?" Or "Was it worth it [for them]?" Or "Was it worth it [for anyone]?"
The first version, wherein the tone implies a "for you," I have an answer for, an honest one. It was. Joining the Air Force is the best decision I ever made. Unforeseeable, or at least unseen, and downstream effects included. Getting out was the second-best. My decision to get out was a personal one, and while I may have complicated feelings about what I did in the military, I don't begrudge anyone who stayed in, is in, or wants to be in. I would only say to the latter group, be careful. It might not be worth it for you. The second version and third versions of this question are, in my experience, the more common ones. These are the questions that undergirded much of the news and commentary that surrounded the "fall" of Afghanistan. They aren't unreasonable questions, on their face. How much time, how much money, how many lives did we as a country devote to fighting in a country completely devoid of any strategic importance? Meh...no clue. No matter what the policy wonks want you to believe, as they will tell you that Afghanistan is bordered by Iran and Pakistan and China and once upon a time the USSR, thereby making it important for global security and affairs, except Afghanistan as a country is little more than a fairy tale, It's simply a place we (the West) decided to name and impose these borders on, so that we could have a location that was (a) conveniently surrounded by our enemies, and (b) ours for the taking. Any importance it has had on the global stage in recent history was purely invented by those who conceived of it in the first place. And how much suffering did Afghans have to go through in that time? Constantly living under the fear of the Taliban's return, their reversion to the dark ages, their loss of, (gasp), 'democracy'. These verbal isotopes are convenient, as they protect the speaker from asking what they actually want to know: "What do WE get out of it?" Or "What will Afghanistan look like, thanks to us?" (Because does anyone really care what Afghanistan got out of it?) Often, the person asking one of these questions is hoping for an answer to both; it's more of an "and" than an "or." I have answers for these questions too, though they aren't honest. They're not as ready, not as pithy as my first answer, as they largely depend on the context of the conversation. But as a rule, said answers usually involve deferring, demurring, de-something-ing, instead of saying what I usually want to: "F--- you!"... and your newfound, if not completely artificial then at least conveniently timed anxiety for a country of 40 million people, except, oh wait, for you they aren't people, they're "those poor people" or "all those Afghanis" (FYI: an Afghani is a currency, not a person, by the by) or, best of all, "those women," (said with every bit of emphasis you can muster) on the plight of those poor creatures who will return to being if not beasts of burden then at least subhuman under the Taliban's rule, a predestination that you have a Calvinist fervor for because you already consider these women So Much Lesser Than You. You aren't asking, "What will the women in Afghanistan do?" You are asking "What will happen TO the women in Afghanistan?" Your conceptualization of these vibrant, exceptional humans who are part of a culture, millennia older than almost any you could claim, completely denies them agency. In your mind they are not women, they are the 'Other', and you are a sanctimonious idiot for deigning to think of them in your moments of outrage that only comes into being when directly confronted with the consequences of your particular brand of "American exceptionalism." If you want to care about women's rights, go buy a bicycle. Or at least an electric car. Stop buying oil and supporting the world's most fervent exporter of regressive, subjugating, militant, violent Islam. (Hint: It's a place that, unlike Afghanistan, is actually mostly desert.) At least stop to consider the number of things you purchase that were made in a country that is currently, actively, sterilizing women of a certain ethnic minority. (Hint: It's a place where most things are made.) Or, maybe, I don't know, get out and vote, and not just when it's a convenient way to virtue signal, once you finally realize that... Oh, women's rights in this country are at risk too! If you want to know what Afghanistan will look like, it isn't that hard. Look at any picture of it from the last ten years. Look at all the blown-up buildings, the walls that are more bullet holes than concrete, the miles and miles of burned poppy fields. Watch a video of the aftermath of the suicide bomb that killed at least 170 people when we withdrew from Afghanistan, dozens of their bodies floating in a blood-tinged canal. Note how the person who is filming it, their hand doesn't shake, their voice doesn't crack, there are no screams of surprise or fear. They've seen worse, and they've seen it more times than you can, quite literally, imagine. (You could also look at pictures from Iraq. Or Syria. Or Libya. Or Yemen. Or any of the other places we like to drop bombs on. Dealer's choice.) Once I'm done screaming at you in all of my inarticulate rage, you may say, "Whoa, whoa! But like, what about what the Taliban will do now that they're back in power?" What about it? Less than a week after our nation's ill-fated flight, Anand Gopal published a piece in The New Yorker entitled "The Other Afghan Women." In it, he detailed the state of affairs in the countryside of Afghanistan, where more than 70 percent of the population lives. He was there in the early summer of 2021, before all of Afghanistan had been officially reclaimed by the Taliban. But most of it was under their rule, including the areas he was traveling through. The people he talked to, more specifically the women he talked to, were significantly more at ease now that the Taliban was back in control. Without Americans fighting them, and without the monstrously corrupt Afghan National Army being backed by American forces, violence was at its lowest point in years. A week and a half after that The New York Times published a separate piece that further detailed the new quiet that pervaded the countryside. There were no air strikes. Firefights, once a daily occurrence, were few and far between. There were fewer checkpoints, Talib or otherwise. Afghanistan was, in fact, safer with the Taliban in charge. What is it, that you're so afraid of the Taliban doing? Enforcing their own moral code on those who don't wish to live by that code? Drive to Texas. Or California. Same thing's happening there. It's called government. Enacting retribution without courts? I refer you to the time we used a drone to kill a sixteen-year-old American citizen because his dad -- another American citizen whom we killed without due process -- had been deemed a terrorist. Killing people for no reason other than their ancestry? We've got lynching's aplenty here in the USA. The argument implicit in this question of what the Taliban will do, is that we were somehow doing it better. I suspect this argument is unavoidable; most people or institutions are the hero in their own story. Or at the very least what they're doing is "worth it." Ends and means, etc. But the United States isn't interested in being in the story. They want to write it. Because if they don't, it gets a lot harder to see their actions as valorous. Excerpt from "What The Taliban Told Me" by Ian Fritz. Copyright © 2023 by Ian Fritz. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, N.Y. Flag-draped transfer cases line the inside of a C-17 Globemaster II in August, prior to a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. The fallen service members died while supporting noncombatant evacuation operations in Kabul. Photo by Jason Minto, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.
When a helicopter hovered over an American embassy as U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan, it reminded MANY of an image made 50 years ago in Saigon. That wasn’t the end of the similarities. As service members, families, and the people who lived in the battle-struck countries watched the end of 'lost wars', they asked the very same questions:
“Did they die for nothing?” And, “Why did it take so long?” Both generations, five decades apart, lack the cohesiveness of the pride that comes with a victory. Both generations faced fluctuating narratives as the mission changed—or remained unclear—and as political and military leaders withheld information and offered falsities to justify continued losses. But there are many differences, and those differences can leave today’s veterans feeling as if no one cares, as if the citizens who rallied around them and sent them to face injuries and loss and possible death, quickly lost interest if they were not connected to the military themselves, as the majority of Americans simply are not. Today, it's different. There’s no societal uproar or protests or outpouring. The previously ubiquitous troop-supporting bumper stickers faded long ago, and reaction to the drawdown ranged from sudden anger at the political level to something closer to a whimper, with some saying, “I didn’t know we still had troops in Afghanistan.” “It never ceases to amaze me how little some of our citizens know about the journeys of veterans and really what our service members are doing all around the world,” says Tara Galovski, the director of the women’s health sciences division at the National Center for PTSD, as well as an associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. It didn’t, of course, start that way. The planes hit the towers and the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, and the nation rose up to fight the ones “who did this to us.” But then the fervor faded. No draft to ensure the battles they faces, touched all U.S. citizens. There was no clear mission to rally around. And 20 years passed. When the youngest troops don’t even remember—weren’t even born yet— for the event that sparked the fight...passion fades, even within the armed forces. This is the narrative a nation created, even if by negligence. Still. As the forever wars end, and as the military and the nation move to the next phase of fighting terror (perhaps with China and/or Russia), as well as the skirmishes that will arise as resources are diminished, there has to be a way forward, a way to heal, a way to grab hold of a nation’s collective grief—or to build that grief, (if the nation does not yet collectively grieve)—and frame it, to say, “This is what we learned,” or, “This is what we lost,” or, “These are the ones we remember.” In our previous wars, victorious or not, the veterans claimed the conversation: Their sayings: Catch-22. The things they carried: Poems, songs, and so on. “There’s a lot of literature out there,” says Ron Capps, the founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project, as well as an Army veteran of the war in Afghanistan. “But I don’t think there’s yet a narrative like "The Things They Carried", a narrative like "Catch-22" or any of the World War II novels that came out. And I wonder. … World War I, was a poet’s war, World War II, I think, was a novelist’s war. Vietnam, I think, turned out to be a filmmakers’ or a movie makers’ war.” But the forever wars? “I don’t know what Afghanistan’s going to be yet,” Capps said. But he has an idea. He has worked with veterans for years. Listened to their laughter, comforted their tears. Understood the instant comradery that comes from shared jokes, shared dirt, and shared sorrow. The epic tales won’t be of the grand mission or the goals of the generals and politicians. The veterans will tell their stories: the individual, poignant bits that help people to understand and to care. They already tell the tales, stories with beginnings, middles, and endings, stories that will need to be sorted into something we can bear, that will help us heal. Stories told to friends’ parents, and to their own. To lovers, bosses, and acquaintances. The veterans? Well, they will frame the narrative. But Frances FitzGerald, who traveled to South Vietnam as a journalist in 1966 and focused on the effects of the war on the local population in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, says the troops themselves were also different, and they changed the narrative long before the war ended. The service members in Iraq and Afghanistan served in a professional military, and the end of deployment often means simply a change of duty station. Career service members also understand that their job is to perform 'the people’s will', and they signed a contract saying they will do just that. But most draftees spent one year in Vietnam, and, if they lived through it—and the majority of them did—they started counting the days, and often changing their attitudes, as they saw the path towards home. Images from the war show peace signs on helmets and people in uniform at protests. When the Vietnam War ended, FitzGerald says the nation felt more fury than grief, bringing on what is known as “Vietnam Syndrome,” or the belief that the nation’s leaders could not be trusted to go to war again. “It’s my belief that very few Americans are grieving about this,” she says, referring to the way the war ended in Afghanistan. “The people that are grieving are the ones who are the families of the soldiers who were killed there. But Afghanistan has really not been a major issue for most people, I don’t think—certainly not recently, because the numbers of troops sent there have been quite low, and the casualties very few, by comparison to Iraq, as well as Vietnam.” There’s also a sense that the leadership, rather than the service members, was responsible for the failures in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Alexander says. “Certainly the reception and the climate around Americans, supporting veterans, is very different in post-9/11 wars than it was in the Vietnam era,” Galovski says. “There’s a lot more support for veterans returning from wars now.” Jeffrey Alexander, a sociology professor at Yale University and expert in cultural identity and trauma, says there’s a flip side to that coin: He wonders if the same sense of cynicism could develop for wars in which the majority of Americans simply did NOT engage. “There’s been no mass movement against the war in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Alexander says. “None. ZERO. In a way, it’s allowed these political elites to operate completely with abandon.” The post-9/11 veterans must reclaim the narrative, in part, because it’s convoluted, Alexander says. He presented the questions of war: What are we willing to sacrifice? What did we ask the troops to sacrifice for? As service members headed off to Afghanistan in October after the 9/11 attacks, the goal seemed clear: Seek out terrorists and prevent them from attacking us again. Soon after, the George W. Bush Administration made a case for going to war with Iraq, saying Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”—as Bush had said even as he ran for president--that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda. On March 19, 2003, the United States launched an Air War in Iraq. As the ground war began the next day, troops looked for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, BUT they didn’t find them. Both the weapons accusation and the claim that Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda turned out to be false! As the hunt for weapons began in Iraq, interest in Afghanistan dissipated. Osama bin Laden escaped in December 2001 after a 12-day battle in Tora Bora, and the Taliban collapsed, leaving its leadership to hide in the mountains. In 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the fighting was over, while Bush stood under a “mission accomplished” banner on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Focus turned to Iraq as 8,000 troops remained in Afghanistan, but the mission in both countries soon became unclear. “It seems to me, the narrative was broken a long time ago,” Alexander says. “In common-sense terms, the story changed a few times. But there was always an effort to create a fearsome enemy that was apocalyptically dangerous to this country, such that it would justify this continuing sacrifice of lives, and attention, et cetera.” Even as administrations changed, the mission remained unclear. Public affairs pushed for stories about newly built schools and programs for women. Generals argued that the missions were going well, while knowing they weren’t. “Each of those goals failed,” Alexander says. “I mean, democracy didn’t come. Some freedom for women came.” Then President Barack Obama came into office, and SEAL Team 6 killed Bin Laden in 2011, ostensibly accomplishing the original mission. But by then, the story had changed AGAIN. The Islamic State took over portions of Iraq and Syria. They took responsibility for attacks in France, Belgium, and Egypt. Then they moved into Afghanistan and claimed responsibility for that final attack at the airport in Kabul. “Was that sense of danger sustained successfully over 20 years despite the blatant changes in the story, as represented within the Bush presidency, then Obama and Trump and finally Biden?” Alexander says. “And then the other question is, is this the ending? The pullout—which is, in a way, the END of the story—was it such the kind of thing that would completely undermine the goal for which we fought because, hey, the Taliban are back.” No... The story, the narrative, morphed because of a lack of audience. “I think it’s very dangerous to have a volunteer army,” Alexander says, “because it allows leaders to think that they can make wars with little cost.” The veterans, themselves, may be able to change that, Alexander says. “Soldiers volunteer, and they fought and sacrificed as individuals,” he says, “but at the same time, and in that sense, they NEED a bigger goal—which they had, of course—but there are also studies that have shown since World War II that soldiers think of their PLATOON and their local group in terms of whether their sacrifice or that of others’ were worthwhile.” That, he says, isn’t touched by “broader futility” about meaning or mission. Instead, as famously stated by Vietnam War correspondent Joe Galloway (in the movie made from his book), “But in the end, they fought not for their country or their flag, they fought for each other.” SMILE AWHILEMONTH BY MONTH: APRILWHAT DAYS ARE YOUR FAVORITES?
Everything You Should Know About April!
By Catherine Boeckmann By April, spring has finally sprung, and if we’re lucky, the weather will reflect that! We hope that your sky is bright and clear and your grass is growing green. See your April weather forecasts, the many spring holidays and festivals this month, seasonal recipes, garden tips, and more! The month of April gets its name from the Latin word aperio, meaning “to open [bud],” because plants really begin to grow now. WANT TO KNOW MORE? CLICK BELOW!! |
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