The message couldn't be plainer:
Israel's intransigence could cost American lives. "
Mark
Perry - Foreign PolicyPfc. Erin L.
McLyman, 26, of Federal Way, Wash., died March 13, 2010 in Balad, Iraq,
of wounds sustained when enemy forces attacked her base with mortar
fire. She was assigned to the 296th Brigade Support Battalion, 3rd
Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Joint Base
Lews-McChord, Wash. Government
Press Release (hat
to Rutabaga Ridgepole)
When I
followed up the government press release, the picture of Erin McLyman
that I found in the Tacoma News Tribune, hit me like a punch in the
stomach. Paint a red beard on her and she looks just like I did at 26...
That's the age she was when she died.
My family tree is filled with McThises and McThats and before it turned
gray I had the same Celtic red hair as Erin did, and so did my mom, and
so did her mom, and for that matter so did
her mom too... and
Badb only knows how
many more of us before that.
If this tribal business is so important in all things pertaining to the
Middle East, Erin might not have been of "
The Tribe", but she
sure as hell was from
my tribe.
It also brought it home to me that when we hear talk about "support our
troops", it's not like when I was a kid and they were "our boys"... Now
it's "our girls" that are also getting cut down by enemy fire, in a
useless war, in what, with no exaggeration, we could call the "the
flower of their youth".
The
latest Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldier reported killed in Iraq
overcame drug addiction in her teen years and later served in the Air
Force and Army before dying from mortar fire on her first deployment.
(...) The 26-year-old is the fourth soldier from the Stryker brigade to
die since it deployed in August; the first three were not
combat-related.(...) And, to underscore the increasing role women play
in combat zones, three of the past four Lewis-McChord soldiers to die in
Iraq have been women. Tacoma
WA. News Tribune
She looks vital and charming
in the photo, but as you see reading the article she didn't have that
easy a life. She was obviously a person of will power, able to take
control of her life and possessed of a desire to escape a toxic
environment and have something to be proud of.
Her short life and violent death also brings home some other things that
bear thinking about. According to her home town newspaper she was proud
to serve, and her family is proud of her sacrifice.
If she was and they are, we should be too.
But, to me it is a hell of a thing that we have arranged our economic
system in such a way that, these days, practically the only way that a
pretty working class girl with only a high school education can avoid
the fate of slaving, working-poor, in a Walmart or as a waitress in a
funky bar and all that goes with that and manage to achieve a structured
life with good medical care and opportunities for vocational training
or further education and a decent pension on retiring is to have to risk
losing her life or getting mutilated in some far off land.
And find herself buying the farm just for trying to get things that are
simply the normal entitlements that go with citizenship in most
developed countries.
Helluva thing.