2004 Soap Box Archives

Heroes 05/10/04

He was just a kid, a handsome strapping twenty something with the finely toned muscles of an athlete. But now he was lying in a bed.

His right arm lay at his side, all but useless due to the Iraqi bullet he had taken a few days before. As I talked to him he told me that he wanted to get well and go back “down range” which is a military term for going back to Iraq to join his buddies in the war.

He told me about being shot and telling his Sergeant Major to put a tourniquet on his right arm and to put his rifle in his good left hand so he could keep on shooting.

He was a brave and unusual young man but his attitude was matched by almost all the wounded heroes I visited with at
Landstuhl Military Hospital at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

One young man had lost his leg from the knee down and he asked a visiting general to have the medical staff give him a prosthesis so he could return to the battle.

I saw soldiers who had been shot, others had been injured by mortar rounds and car bombs. I met one soldier who had received two purple hearts in one day.

It was a touching and truly amazing experience visiting with these young men. So young, so brave, so patriotic, so dedicated to getting back to the fighting.

You couldn’t help thinking about the pompous television commentators and self-serving politicians who demean and criticize their mission on a daily basis.

And yes it hurts them. It hurts them because they put their lives on the line and CNN seems to be more concerned with the Iraqis while their side of the story is seldom told. It hurts them because
they see what is happening in Iraq and know that the mass majority of the Iraqi people are happy that they have come to liberate them but the BBC is not interested in telling the world about that. They’d rather spend 24 hours a day reporting the atrocities of a handful of soldiers deplorable treatment of a few Iraqi prisoners

These soldiers know what their mission is and they know how to accomplish it in spite of a bias major media which had rather
report the negative and ignore the positive.

There is a lot more going on in Iraq than we are being told. Good things like schools and hospitals being built, but when is the last time you’ve heard Dan Rather talk about that?

People are being given jobs at a much higher wage than they ever made under Saddam. But Peter Jennings had rather ignore that and report some isolated incident that makes America’s military look bad.

There are plenty of reporters in Iraq and almost all of them tell a different story than the troops.

I only wish that every one of you could spend a few minutes in the hospital wards with these brave young heroes and hear the truth.

How about it Teddy Kennedy, will you go over there with me and let me introduce you to some real heroes?

Pray for our troops.

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

 

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