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The following is a link to a 2008 piece printed in
the Black Commentator entitled "Welcome Home Soldier, Now Shut Up" which I do hope that you read. (http://www.blackcommentator.com/283/283_welcome_home_shut_up_rockwell_guest.html) It is good that Americans thank our country's veterans, but as you
will gather from the article by Paul Rockwell many of these veterans need a different kind of thanks ... they need us to listen
to their stories and for us to try to understand their experiences, which some of us would rather not listen to
or try to understand. For all too many Americans it would throw a monkey wrench into the simplistic, "clean" Hollywood version
of American troops being the "good guys" and that they hurt nobody but the "bad guys" and that they are killing and getting
killed in foreign lands to "defend our freedoms" here at home.
For too Americans at home, their only responsibility once
the combat veterans return home is to publicly and ceremoniously thank them, call them "heroes" and then go about
their own business and forget about the combat veterans they only yesterday "honored". A lot of Americans would
rather not know what our veterans went through and are still going through and the help that they so much need from us.
The reality of America's many wars of aggression on behalf of
what President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell speech to the nation in January of 1961 ... that being the overwhelming
influence of the Military-Industrial-Complex ... is that lives of the innocent are violently taken, atrocities are committed,
veterans have to live with what they did and what was done to them, and as always the truth comes out that the wars were
not about what they were sold to us as but instead about enriching corporate benefactors. 2-time Congressional Medal
of Honor recipient Major General Smedley Butler, USMC wrote about it in his 1935 memoir "War Is A Racket: A Few
Profit and The Many Pay" (http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm)
Perhaps you will want to share it with your readers, and then
again perhaps you will choose not to. Either way, Toney, I know you to be one who truly cares and does more than talk
the talk ... demonstrated for one by the work you put into your website.
Your friend,
Phil Restino
Chapter Co-Chair, VFP Chapter 136
Central Florida Veterans For Peace
P.O. Box 9012
Daytona Beach, FL 32120-9012
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