9/11

Well, today is September 11, a date which--like Pearl Harbor Day on December 7--will live in infamy.  On this day, I want to give a shout-out to our brave men and women who serve in uniform, who put themselves in harm's way to root out and destroy the kind of evil that led to that fateful day when the towers fell in New York City.

No matter what you may think about the political motivations that got us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there can be no doubt that the individuals who serve in our military are brave, self-sacrificing, and patriotic.  The hardships they endure--the separations from family, the privations, the constant threats to the health of their minds and bodies--to protect the freedoms we enjoy in this country are Herculean.  These people are heroic, and we all owe them a debt of gratitude.

My newly wedded niece, an officer in the National Guard who married and Army officer, recently posted the most heartbreaking picture on her Facebook page.  It showed a big, strong soldier getting ready to leave on deployment, wearing fatigues (ACU's, they call them now) and sitting on a bench, holding his newborn baby daughter in the crook of his left arm.  He was obviously in tears, covering his eyes with his free hand.  It brought a lump to my throat to look at it, as it reminded me of my son's tough goodbye to his one-month-old twin daughters.  He was on an Army deployment throughout his wife's whole pregnancy.  He missed the girls' birth in June of 2011, then returned stateside for a few weeks of leave to meet them and be there for their Baptism.  After such a short visit, he had to go back to Afghanistan to serve out the remaining three months of his deployment.  That, to me, is true heroism.  I don't know how he did it--I don't know how any of them do it.

I wrote a post about 9/11 a year ago on this date, and it says what I want to say just the way I want to say it, so I'm going to re-post a link to it here.  (I hate to use the lazy man's blogging technique, but I really don't think I could express what I feel any better today than I did last year.)

God bless our troops, and God bless America.

Here's the link to that post: mumsie2five.blogspot.com/2011/09/remembering-911.html.