So hard to imagine in 2000 that my nation and my people would be in this place today.  I grew up in a time when my nation mourned Vietnam.  When our vets huddled in broken groups at VA hospitals and we lost them and lost them and lost them some more and everybody said never again after seeing the broken and hearing what they broke and what broke them.

I know you'll read this when you get home.  You read all the stuff here every day.  Mom please stop coming to this place.  I have told you face to face that this place is not healthy for you.  You always talk to me and help me when people are not healthy for me and I'm hanging around with them.  These people are not healthy for you mom.  They don't care about you and honestly they enjoy hurting you and you are letting them.  I know these were the first people who were really nice to you when you were hurting inside about Dad and Iraq but they are like Wren.  They were your first friend on your first day at a new school and a lot of the time that isn't a very good friend.  It hurts me when you hurt so much.  Please let it go mom.  They have hurt you and they have hurt all of us enough.  It is okay to let them go mom.  Nobody will blame you.  You didn't do anything wrong.  You are the best mom I know and I want you to be happy inside again so please stop coming here.  Our family can't do what it needs to do mom when you are sad so much.  I love you.

[From the diaries by susanhu. Exceptional diary.]

The soldiers that I know most closely served early in Iraq II in that western region that included Fallujah and Ramadi and also the town of Husayba.  Husayba is where operation Steel Curtain is going down right now.  Steel Curtain is being sold in the press as an attempt to breach the gushing flow of foreign fighters who enter into the Iraq fracas by crossing the Syrian/Iraq border. They are calling the fighters Al Qaeda fighters too.......what does that mean?  Did Osama send them or is every pissed off muslim coming to fight the Americans in Iraq automatically in Al Qaeda now?

The Euphrates crosses the Syrian/Iraq border and runs through the border town of Husayba.  If you have seen Al Qaim written in the press at times it is essentially the same area,  Al Qaim = Husayba.  Leaving Husayba, the Euphrates meanders through towns that include Ramadi and Fallujah on its way to Bahgdad.  It isn't a huge river but it is sufficient and feeds almost all of the large lakes that Iraq claims it's own.

North of Husayba on the Syrian/Iraq border is what appears to be severely washed out land that resembles the badlands to me (I've seen photos).  The deep trenches washed into the land though easily hide bands of whoever on foot.

South of Husayba on the Syrian/Iraq border is open desert.  I think that often we like to think of people in this region of the world as being on foot or aboard a camel but the truth is that these folks really do have cars and trucks and such things, and they know how to drive them too. The southern Syrian/Iraq border can easily be crossed in a vehicle and makes having immediate access to water not much of an issue for incoming fighters.

In the middle of this doo doo would anybody like to break up the rage with a little blogging on HBO series "ROME"?  

I know all of you frog marchers are pink clouding lately, and of course it is all rumor and nothing solid has happened yet as I have reminded some.  My mescaline arrived today though!  Sorry I've been so hard on ya'll.  You guys have lovingly embraced me in my I HATE IRAQ AND THE WHOLE THING IS KILLING ME CRUSADE and I am forever grateful and would like to share my favorite rumor with you guys.

We can't seem to thrive without it, most of us seem to spend our lives in some sort of quest of it, and living under the trickle down of the Bush Administration has driven a few of us nuts because of the total lack of it.  I speak of truth.

Many came forward to speak it about the Bush Administration. If something existed in their life though that wasn't right up there with the claimed standards of the rightwingnutty double dog christy Christs it was jerked out of the gloam and slapped right under every photo of every single article written about them speaking the truth, or fed into the ticker tape as we watched their lips move in unison with it on television.  It has allowed the truths they speak to be shrugged off because those who oppose them are BETTER PEOPLE than the truth tellers.

Cindy Sheehan is luckily a person who was really boring.  She is Hetro and worked at the Health Department helping people and raised soldiers for her country who went to church.  Now she spends her life spreading Peace just like Jesus.  She is such a nice, decent, kind, thoughtful person she, she, she, she ought to be shot!  They have one hell of a time smearing her other than her divorce, and that seems to be caused by the death of her son so that isn't any good either damn it!  Sometimes they claim that she can't let go and move on and then they shut the hell up suddenly about that too because what baseball loving, apple pie baking, mother worth her salt just "gives up" on loving her American children forever and ever!  That damn woman is a thorn, AND THEN WALKS IN IAN FISHBACK!

I am slow Okay?  I'm forty and the kids drive me nuts sometimes and the simple answers evade me easily on most days.  Once again we have a "Fuck the Troops" diary up and I can't blame anybody.  I watch some of the stuff that happens and I say Fuck them too on some days.  It always seems like there isn't anything that I can do and sometimes believing that there isn't anything that I can do but sit at this keyboard and bitch keeps me sitting at this keyboard bitching.  I contacted the Benderman's last year when I read the story about Kevin fighting going back to Iraq and having his Conscientious Objector Status paperwork seeming to take forever meaning that he was going to be getting on that plane and in Iraq before anything would be decided and that is just a little bit too late!  I had so much hope.  They had press coverage and they were organized, Monica seemed very  upbeat and then Kevin went jail just like my husband said that he would.

[From the diaries by susanhu. Right on, sister.]

I read Pat Lang's story, and watched the glorious video of O'Reilly and Wes Clark at Crooks and Liars and I'm humming to myself today.

At a time when our military in many ways has become tarnished, untrusted, and seems to be giving off a foul odor that smells distinctly like just plain evil, Clark reminds us all about the military that we once had under different Commanders and Chiefs.

He reminds us of how following the Geneva Convention and sticking strictly to our standards made our military once the envy of the disorderly unethical world.  That was awhile back though.

I will agree with one thing that Bush said lately and that is that the leadership sets the tone ... he said that pertaining to racism and poverty but in the real world it pertains to everything really in some way.

This is my favorite photo of my son.  He is about six months old in it.  My son was born with Freeman Sheldon Syndrome, a very rare gene mutation that really only one person in the world knows much about and of course being me I found him and went to talk with him about it.

My son had a gene mutate during conception that caused him to not code for small muscle groups at around 19 weeks after conception. He has Classic Freeman Sheldon Syndrome and there are two other subtypes that appear to have similar symptoms but that they now know are not the same.

All the children who have FSS look similar in the same way that people who have Downs look similar.  You will probably only see one person in your lifetime though with FSS so noticing that similarity in them all probably won't happen for you.

It is a syndrome that has existed for as long as we have been keeping track of mankind.  It is no respecter of race or sex, and we are fairly certain that a totem in the Northeast United States is of a Native American woman who had it and she was known as the Wild Woman of the Woods and was a spiritual leader from what we can tell.

I love this photo because my son at this point was not able to move much for himself but he forgot to be bummed out about it all.  His noodle works just fine.  He was often frustrated about not being able to get where he wanted to go, and I was in constant demand to be his mobility because he would let me know when he wanted to go somewhere. At seven months he started calling me "Mo".  It was as much as he could spit out and he had to find a way to get my direct attention and not be ignored or overlooked.

It was a given that Cindy was going to be arrested on Monday. Know many more family members of dead soldiers from Iraq will be arrested too and I have no idea how many times.  Iraq Veterans Against the War and just plain old Iraq veterans against the war are going to be arrested.....they carry scars they will never be able to fully mend inflicted on them by liars and war profiteers and they happen to live in a democracy that doesn't want to hear them.  Be assured that veterans from the Vietnam War will be arrested and arrested and arrested because this country said NEVER AGAIN and now the motherfucking promise has been broken and nobody fucking cares enough to make this fucking nightmare STOP!  Most of them lost everything a long time ago and the only thing they had left that lulled them to sleep at night was NEVER AGAIN  and the only way they can stay sane is to go protest and be arrested!  Know that most likely at some point I will be arrested because I know how soldiers are coming back from Iraq and I know that it is being ignored and I know that they are sending the broken back into combat to become irreparable and this mission is all FUCKING BULLSHIT and nobody who counts in ending it all wants to hear me or gives a flying fuck and I would rather go to jail ashamed of my country and this government than live free whispering lies to myself over and over again while I put on my Mary Kay every morning in Stepford.  You could see people like Janet and Ryan arrested also because Vietnam and PTSD robbed them of a father and childhood and this nation promised them Never Again and they made the best of the lemons they were handed. It is happening again though and the children of parents with PTSD will have their childhood stolen from them.  The only Never Again people like Janet can give those children is that NEVER AGAIN will it be done on their watch and people ever be able to claim ignorance to the facts that it is and will happen again, and if their voices aren't heard they may also take that last step towards being acknowledged.

Being arrested is our final calculation because our heart and soul demands it from us and that is how calculated it all is.  It is the only way left now that we can hope to be heard. If our loved one is dead we have run out of time to be heard.  If our loved is in combat in Iraq or heading back to Iraq or broken from Iraq and needs some fixing we are living on borrowed time to be heard.  If we carry the scars from the last morally unjust war or the wounds that are beginning to scar from this morally unjust war, time for us is haunted and a new time must arrive NOW before the boogeyman carries us away finally. We would rather scream behind bars than alone in the dark!  It is like calculating the making of a tuna sandwich at noon.

Yeah, you all clicked on this hoping to see Booman in my underwear huh?  What a sad sad sad bunch of people!  What brings my underwear drawer into this diary is that that is the place where the women in my family keep certain things. I don't know why we do that and I have thought about it a lot too at times.  The only thing I have been able to come up with is that the underwear drawer is where we keep our private things that live very close to our skin.  Mine has my grandmothers final hand written list of what she wanted done and her last Christmas wish to my son who was just a baby then.  I keep my pearls there too. I always wanted pearls and don't ask me why, I just did.  I thought that my husband would one day buy then for me and I awoke one morning once again husbandless and decided that my approach to obtaining pearls was totally fucking stupid and went and bought them for myself, Cabingirl totally understands this.  I also keep the handwritten letter from my husband stamped Freemail October 2003 there.  All of the "Freemail" letters before that one were about how much he loved us and missed us and how lucky he was to have the wife he had caring for our medically challenged son and our daughter while holding everything down as he fought for freedom on the other side of the world.

The October letter said no such thing.  It said, "I hate it here and all I'm doing is training a new world class terrorist that tests us everyday and finds our weak points, and all we do is give them more reason to hate us and despise us and want to kill us."  It said, "My only reason to be here that will keep me sane for the next six months is that maybe I can prevent others from dying, and that is all I have to cling to to keep me going."

On the way to my car Sunday night Mike (supersoling)said something about me being very serious or tenacious and on the way home I wondered where it all started for me.  I got off the highway for awhile and hit some backroads to think about that and I discovered the answer in my underwear drawer.

We all have had best friends and we all know how sometimes what our best friend goes through colors and affects our own lives as much as our own personal experiences.  My husband is my best friend.  He understands things about me that have baffled most men for decades and he just showed up in my life that way.  I didn't know the day that I opened up that letter that the small front wheel drive economy wagon I bought to throw cross country skis in and head up the Rockies at the drop of hat or a few "free hours" would come to live in Alabama where there is no snow, and make huge long distance trips in all directions that could possibly end in a good jailing!  I had no idea that exercise and healthy living would take a backseat to days of a foot on the gas pedal and standing in gas station stores attempting to decide which item advertised as food would take the least amount of time off of my life.   I had no clue that day, but that was one of the days in my life that changed EVERYTHING.  We all get those and usually we only recognize them when we get a moment to look back.

I take a break now for my favorite photo that sums it all up for me.  I know a similar one has been taken but this one is mine and supersoling is a warrior born in between wars Thank God!  Now he is a warrior speaking for the silenced warriors being abused right now.  He fights for them and he is the epitome of an American who fully knows his personal responsibility in keeping our Democracy a Democracy and he is working overtime right now.  

Well it super sucks, we have sleazy ass Dems voting for Roberts and we are fighting and bickering amongst ourselves now because we feel powerless.  Booman and Kid Oakland take their jobs as bloggers very seriously and everybody feels they are doing all they can to bring some change and still we feel and experience our voicelessness.

I saw something in Crawford take place though, something that I had heard rumors about but certainly it couldn't be that bad!  It all just had to be rumors but it isn't.  The right has their own film crews that travel about and take film footage of what the Bushies want footage of from the angle that causes them to be perceived as powerful.  I saw the film crews in Crawford and they were only there to shoot the counterprotest and they cut the protesters out of every shot and made sure that they were shooting when the counterprotesters were in their maximum numbers which only lasted two hours usually while the Cindy Sheehan protesters LIVED out there.  I suspect that that film footage was provided to the networks free of charge and it hit the television so fast and it was every where on the air so quickly my head was spinning!

It wasn't as if I didn't see CNN or MSNBC out there because I did but they didn't orchestrate much to make sure they got certain things on film.  They like hotel rooms and showers and they would show up around noonish and be gone around fiveish.  The Bushies filmers go where they need to go when they need to go to shoot what they are supposed to shoot and then they get that free footage right to the networks as fast as they can and the networks use it!  People still watch T.V. more than anything.  Where is our press coverage people?  Where is our independent press coverage that will shoot D.C. and every other protest out there and send that footage to the networks for free?

I know that it is no guarantee that it will be used but at least we would have a leg to stand on then that the media is bought off.  If it started being used though there would be more than a couple of sleazy ass Dems sweating!  Doesn't Soros have a couple of bucks laying around and isn't there any real journalists out there tired of this bullshit and wanting some full coverage of all this?  I swear to God if I didn't have a disabled child to care for I would create my own job.  I know nothing about filming events but I'm not afraid to make calls, tell people what I need and where I need them, and talk to people to start certain balls rolling!  The Bushies have better financing than we do but that is a pitiful excuse if anybody attempts to use it! I couldn't believe what a little bit of heart and little bit of soul and little bit of elbow grease accomplished in Crawford, the Texas no where town from hell!

Life is so boring right now.  Never thought I would post such a diary but it has been a boring week once they began actually doing something for the stranded and dying in New Orleans.  I have spit fire about Iraq for like forever and then a soothing balm was applied two days ago.  I spoke with a reporter over the phone who is part of a very well covered story coming out in a few months about soldiers coming home with combat stress and being redeployed while taking meds and she is also hunting and finding soldiers who experienced it in theater and were given meds and their gun back while still in combat.  She shared one interview with me where the soldier had been told that because of the meds he wasn't allowed to drive but he could still carry a gun.........God it's getting pathetic over there isn't it?  She told me that Military Families Speak Out had sent some emails out and she had received fifty replies when she walked in the office the next morning, I'm sure more will follow too. Below the fold is a story from my daughter's life and I asked her today if I could share it because maybe someone will get a chuckle or a kick out of it and we all could probably use a few.

That the reason why helicopters from Fort Rucker have not been used for rescue and to drop food and water to Katrina survivors is because the Commander of the National Guard has said that he wants no help from the Army until it has been shown that the National Guard can't handle it anymore.  He seems to be the only one who doesn't know that THEY HAVE BEEN SHOWN THAT THEY CAN'T HANDLE IT! How has this kind of insanity fruited on the vine?

I can't even begin to understand this Commander.  When we lived in Colorado Springs and the blizzard of 1996 occurred, the Army out of Fort Carson landed helicopters in the parking lots of Walmart and loaded up baby formula, medicine, food, and diapers and dropped them into very specific locations for very specific people.  The only people who perished in that blizzard were two people in a car outside of town who pulled over on the side of the road.  A house was very close by but they couldn't see it in the blizzard.  

There was a huge blizzard in 1977 also.  I was just a kid then.  It was a horrible blizzard though, killed all the cattle for miles.  They suffocated in the snow. Fort Carson troops drove tanks around some of the streets and rescued people trapped in their cars.  I have seen Army troops called in right in line with National Guard for two natural disasters that can't even begin to compare to this.  I just don't understand!

I have also spoken today on post here with Army pilots really pissed off that when the helicopter was shot at yesterday at the Superdome, they suspended operations.  What I have been told is IT IS A MILITARY HELICOPTER AND YOU ARE PREFORMING A KIND OF MILITARY MISSION AND YOU ARE TAKING FIRE SO WHAT'S THE FUCKING PROBLEM?  I heard this from pilots who have served in Iraq.  They are really upset right now that it is okay to take fire to liberate Iraqis but it isn't okay to take fire attempting to rescue and save people in your own country!

I went on post to take photos of the helicopters sitting there but found out there really wasn't any need.  They have been told to stand down by the National Guard Commander.