Seeing the children

Listening to my podcast should give you a better sense of the guys' mission and what they were able to do while deployed. Its both interesting and painful for me to hear of the incredible amount of children being caught in the crossfire of this war every day.  The physical wounds are acute and desperately evident. There is also the more subtle would they all suffer mentally through the hardship and confusion of living life in a third world country and through a wobbly and distorted lens of the "outside" world that is often misconstrued and wharping.  To many of these kids, we are the enemy. Does that not cause you to flinch? For an overall mission who's goal is as much humanitarian as combative, the knowledge that many of these Afghani children are growing up learning to hate us is discouraging to say the least.

Not all feel that way, of course.  Hopefully not even a majority. For the pararescumen flying overhead there are many waves and excited yells, but there are also those kids throwing rocks and shaking their fists as a stoic reminder that even 8 years after the war has started the local people are not convinced their lives are any better.   War is not pretty, and the steps taken to secure our homeland are not always easy. However, trying to reconcile the fact that they are so bred to hate us is a bitter pill to swallow. 

I am proud and thankful for the military forces over there -- ours and the other coalition forces. The work Bo and his team were able to do, especially medically, is noteworthy.  For a country and an enemy who have no qualms using their own people and their own children as collateral damage, the job of rescuing and treating these wounded seems endless.  I can only pray that out of the horror of war, comes peace, and not just a peace with bondage and oppression, but a peace that stems from optimism and freedom.