In the wee dark hours of the night, it is amazing at how well the wind will carry a distant sound. A train, a horn, the bark of a dog.
On this quiet night, the wind blew lightly through the trees in a mystical and haunting way. A flutter of loneliness manifested deep within my loins. One could imagine the trepidation of the early New England inhabitants when confronted by the quiet Autumn night and the thickness of darkness that embraced the wood.
I could hear the sound of the over 40,000 civilians killed in Iraq since our arrival to liberate them from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. (U.N. figures show a steady rise in the number of civilian deaths to more than 100 a day)
There have been 3,044 coalition deaths, 2,809 Americans, two Australians, 119 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, six Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 32 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, two Romanians, two Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of October 26, 2006, according to a CNN count.
I could hear the pain and illness of the over 10,000 soldiers that have been given leave due to mental stress and emotional breakdown.
I thought of my father, who passed away in 1986, who was a POW in the war after the "war to end all wars,"
I grieved in knowing that war and death, politics and religion, the love of money and the inherent greed and blood lust it imposes, is a never ending part of our world.
I cried.
.JPG)
Comments