[LEMONS] 11.03.2003
What Are We Fighting For
This article in Sunday's New York Times is one of the saddest things I've read since the paper of record's Portraits of Grief series. I don't know if it's because I was in Kuwait after Gulf War I, and I know (somewhat) how frightening and unfamiliar that world can be, if it's because I seriously considered joining the military at several points in my life, if it's because I'm from Alabama and I feel like I've known 100 Aubrey Bells, or just that this was another Southern boy my own age. Whatever the reason, this story had me choking back the tears yesterday.Sgt. Aubrey Bell grew up poor. He was raised in the woods drawing water from a well and eating whatever his mother stuck between two slices of bread. Butter sandwiches. Mayonnaise sandwiches. Ketchup sandwiches. You name it.Too many lefties focus only on the Iraqii people. Too many conservatives pretend there is nothing awry, while repeating the mantra "support our troops." I firmly believe we need to pray for and support all the people in Iraq. God Bless our troops. Let's bring them home as quickly as we can. Let's end the occupation and Bush's $87 Billion mess of cronyism and corruption, not by abandoning our duty, but by getting UN cooperation and internationalizing the forces to take some of theburdenn off of those who have already served their countries in far more hostile environments than the skies over Austin in the Texas Air National Guard.
His life, as his friends tell it, was taking a little and making a lot.
"He was just a cheerful, happy dude," said Eric Wingate, a childhood friend.
Sergeant Bell, 32, didn't especially savor the intense Iraqi heat, or sleeping in tents with 100 men and 100 pairs of ripening combat boots.
But he liked children. And in Iraq, the 280-pound soldier in the XXXL uniform drew them like a magnet. "I used to always ask him, why you let them get so close to you?" said his fiancée, Philandria Ezell. "And he'd say, honey, they're just kids."
On Oct. 27, Sergeant Bell, an Alabama National Guardsman with the 214th Military Police Company, was shot in the stomach in front of a police station, where he had been training Iraqi police officers.
His family is furious. As they sat around on folding chairs in his mother's front yard, an ice chest of Miller Lite at their feet, they glared at the ground.
"Why is it O.K. if he dies?" his cousin Vecie Williams asked. "The president don't care. You see him on TV. He says this, he says that. But show me one tear, one tear."
Something that nags them is whether Sergeant Bell was wearing a bulletproof vest. In many of the pictures he sent home he is not. There is nothing between him and the enemy but a few layers of cotton.
"The Army people say he got shot," Ms. Ezell said. "But they don't say nothing more."
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