photo by Mark Lambie/ El Paso TimesSoldiers head for Iraq
"Members of the 1st Squad, 9th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division, including Spc. Kim Choy, foreground, left Friday morning from Biggs Army Airfield en route to Kuwait and then Baghdad. Choy carried her M-16 rifle in one arm and a teddy bear in the other as she prepared to board a 20-hour flight to Kuwait." (El Paso Times)
Last night on our way to the airport, we passed the Fort Bliss deployment center. It's used to move units of soldiers en masse to their new duty stations anywhere in the world. Outside the building were parked three large aircraft--a sure sign troops were on the move. In this morning's El Paso Times was the above photograph. Way to powerful to ignore, I decided to make it Dada's picture of the day.
In a few hours Kim Choy, with trusty M-16 and Teddy bear, along with her army mates, should be landing in Kuwait to begin their new life in Baghdad shortly thereafter. And as I looked at this photo, I found myself asking, "What the fuck have we done to our children?" I'm not a religious person, but I muttered a prayer for all the Teddy bears we are sending into extreme harm's way.
4 comments:
Bless you dada for remembering that they are just children- OUR CHILDREN....
there are not enough Teddy Bears to send in Harms Way....
Now on another note- the very pissed off Buddhist in me would like Someone to knock the Everloving Warmongering Fucking Stuffing out of this Criminal Regime.....The Dick-Condi-Dubya-Rummy-Scumlot of them...
A more incongruous shot I can't imagine. Or maybe not, maybe it's just a teddy bear shaped duffle bag, full of personal items needed for iraq. Hope she remembered to pack a Cloak of Invisibility. What a wide-eyed dewey stare she has, puir lassie.
When we lived near Camp Pendelton, we could also tell when stuff was about to happen. Ordnance (boom, BOOM, BOOOOOOM!!!) pounding day'n'night is pretty hard to ignore. Big black 'copters flying so low the kitchen cabinets almost rocked off the wall were another clue.
Hi, enigma, good to see you around! Buddhist's aren't usually so vengeful, are they? But I'll back you up, pissed-off agnostic that i am. Send the whole deluded pack of warmongers to the bottom of the mississippi delta. Crab-food is about all they're good for now. Care for some rummy-roulade over a little condi-crawdad? I don't think there'd be anything edible out of a dub & dick gumbo (gag)!
Dada, what happened to your blog yesterday? I must've started reading about Gen'l Pace 5 times, but kept getting pulled away. I think you called it WTF. So, wtf? ~~ D.K.
What a heartbreaking photo.
dk...."maybe it's just a teddy bear shaped duffle bag"? That's funny. Listen, I apologize for the WTF blog disappearance, but blogger's been giving me a hard time posting. Like this Teddy bear post wouldn't load for hours. It may have been in all of that that WTF disappeared, i.e., I took it down to see if blogger would do that, but now I can't reload it. But I'll keep trying.
e4e: I meant to respond to your new Enigma Cafe idea over at WSummer--I love it and, of course, Hopper's painting of those lonely night owls is very evocative. I think I really like the idea...but either way, I just hope we get "More, more, more!" of your wit, angst, and anger.
PT: Yeh, I was really moved by this photo. Extremely powerful imagery!
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