Never ever leave a Soldier behind.

[gwheezie]

44. When my dad was 19

he was in the Navy during ww2 and spent some time on small islands in the pacific. We were going through old pictures and I found one of him in his navy uniform, smoking the local weed with a bare breasted woman in a sarong at his side. He finally told me the story how he went awol, wound up in a village somewhere and was partying with a bunch of locals who were one generation from cannibals. His buddies covered for him and searched for him and got him back to the ship before he got into real trouble.
When my husband was in Korea, he went awol on a meth bender, he was a medic and it was easy to get, he had a little place in the village and a girlfriend and just didn't want to go back to base, he had actually thought he didn't want to leave Korea until he came to his senses.
I have 2 nephews who have each done multiple tours in iraq and afghanistan both of them said it took them about 2 weeks after they deployed to figure out the story they were told was bullshit. Neither one of them will even talk about what they did or saw over there, the only comment one has made is that he is afraid to talk about what he really thinks because he thinks he will be called a traitor or terrorist by a bunch of chickenhawks. They were lied to and figured it out, imagine how you would feel, what you would think. And would you feel free to talk about it when 99% of the country has no idea what was done in our name and already made up their minds about how soldiers should behave or feel.
This fella has not been able to tell his side of what happened, there are a handful of emails we have no idea what other emails or statements he made, we have no idea yet some of his fellow citizens seem to think they know enough that we should have let him die as a pow. That doesn't even sound american. The trade we made for him was 5 people who would never be prosecuted because we don't have the evidence to bring charges against them, so are we supposed to hold them forever, that doesn't sound american either.
This entire episode has been disappointing.