Service?

I hate you America. I am tired of all the bullshit squabbling about the most stupid and inane things. I have to worry about how I can see my wife and kids in the few weeks I will get this year while you debate whether American Idol is rigged to include at least one sex scandal each season. Do you even realize how many soldiers read the headlines of what is considered important "back home?" Your priorities as a nation are fucked up. I didn't understand at first why every TV in a chow hall so far away from home was ALWAYS set to play sports. While it smacked of "company store" flavored brain washing, I thought all the usual American commercials were replaced with Department of Defense PSA's due to the remote location more than anything else. I realize now I was wrong. It's all to protect us, the service members, from you. Protect us from your flippant views, your twisted hypocracy, your detached indifference, your skewed priorities, and your general lack of understanding or concern.

Yes, it was my decision to volunteer to serve my country. Yes, I did it even though I thought being in Iraq was most likely going to wind up looking like a bad idea gone out of control. Yes, I know I was going to be giving up damn near my entire concept of what a life was like and supplanting it with a DoD approved version. Yes, I did it knowing I would most likely lose a limb if I was lucky...my life is I was not. I thought what I was doing would be worth something to someone. I thought there would be certain concessions which could be made since I have no qualms about serving in the box. I'll never bitch about being deployed to war, this is why I am here...this is my duty. What did I get instead for my willingness to help? Over a period of 5 years, I will have been allowed only 10 months with my wife and daughters, under permission, broken into 2-3 week chunks, requiring enormous effort to obtain, and very rarely when I was actually needed by my family to be there. Service? Fuck no! This is more akin to indentured servitude. I like what I do and used to feel proud to do it. At this point, I am ashamed and appologetic to everyone who needs me in their life. I used to entertain the likely possibility of continuing my service to the country so long as there was a need for my skillset. When the time comes where a representative of the Army will ask me if I will stay in the Army and present me with a good number of incentives, I will drop all of my military bearing and tell him, "Fuck NO!" Y'all can go fuck yourself, I'm going to start taking care of what is really important in my life...my family, not this nation, not its leadership, not its foreign policy, not its fucked up priorities. Other than myself, nobody else seems to care about them. My leadership, the people responsible for my orders, my congressional representatives, and a great many others don't give a flying rat's ass about my family or about any other servicemember's family. They certainly don't care they have sent me to places where I cannot either bring my family or be with my family. They have shot down my every effort to have family life co-exist with military life. They definitely don't care enough to do anything other than say, "I'm sorry, that sucks."

We do know and appreciate the very small minority of people who do everything they can to help us. We also know the majority of these people have or had a direct tie to military service. Ultimately though, it's but a band aid on an amputated stump. Go back to watching your retarded prime time circus, America, we'll just do what we've always had to do as servicemembers...take care of our own, suck it up, drive on, and hope we will survive to see our family someday.