This is my last web log for 2012, and you will be relieved to know I have neither the talent nor inclination to try and put the year into some sort of perspective other than that it seemed to lack the balance most of us might have preferred.
But as we go about summing the plusses and minuses, let’s spare time to consider the balance sheets of the men and women serving in our behalf throughout the far-flung reaches of our planet, separated from family and loved ones not only by distances measured in miles, but by a sense of purpose it’s all too easy for us to neglect.
Our news is stuffed to the gills with concern for large sectors of our society termed “disadvantaged” for a variety of reasons—occasionally beyond their control—but few are faced with the privations and uncertainties that are the daily fare of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen serving on foreign shores.
I am most mindful of two sons of former Marine Corps buddies from a different era that are among the 241-plus servicemen and women who have died in Afghanistan in the past year. This is a bitter pill for their families and friends to swallow, all the moreso for the black hole of information and support into which their service is sunk. In the decade since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, more than 1,700 US troops have died in action, a number that may seem tame against the backdrop of two world wars and half-a-dozen police actions, but just as sobering—perhaps moreso—is the elevated number of severely wounded the war has produced.
So please take time in the waning hours of 2012 to remember those whom you and I—not some faceless bureaucrats on the Potomac—have sent in harm’s way, lest we repeat the dissociation we allowed to cloud our actions in Southeast Asia.
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