December 04, 2010

Listen
I know you mean well.
When you tell me you wish the war were over,
when you tell me you wish I could come home.
I know you have the absolute best intentions.
But.
You don't tell a police officer to not patrol the streets.
You don't tell a firefighter to stop fighting fires.
You don't tell the surgeon to stop operating on patients.
I am a Soldier.
And this war will not go away on its own.
Listen to me.
I do this for a living.
You trust your doctor.
You trust your banker.
Trust your Soldier.
This is a war we can win.
This is a war we should win.
We have a moral obligation to be here.
When the doctor tells you he looked at the slides, and he
saw something terrible that should not be there,
and he needs to go in with the knife,
you hope, and you pray, but you trust his judgement.
Because that's what he does.
I am a soldier.
This is what I do.
Don't try to stop me.
Don't hold me back.
I've seen something terrible, that should not be there,
and I have to go in with the knife.
Hope,
and pray,
and trust my judgment.
This war needs to be fought, and it will be fought.
And if we pull out, the war will follow us.
You cannot pull out of a war, you can only choose where
to fight it.
Let us fight it here, and now. We've chosen the field
of battle, let us fight here, where we have spent years
learning the battlefield, the people, the language.
Here, in Afghanistan, we have the home-field advantage,
because we've been here for nine years.
If we pull out, we'll fight somewhere else,
somewhere where we don't know the battlefield,
the people,
the language.
Somewhere where we don't have any advantages.
Nine years of continuous war, we've learned so much.
Our armor is different.
Our vehicles are different.
Our computers are different.
Our tourniquets are different.
Our techniques are different.
Everything we do is different.
We are a thousand times the army we were a decade ago.
Almost every one of our soldiers is a combat veteran, some of us many times
over. That experience can only be bought at one price: blood.
Our blood has taught us the lessons we need to know. And we
have learned those lessons. And we are learning those lessons.
Don't shackle us.
Don't hold us back.
Don't give us a deadline,
tell us we have to come home by a certain date.
Give us the men and the equipment and the backing we need to do this
job, and to do it right.
We could have won here years ago, but we never had enough men. We
were never given enough men, enough equipment, enough backing
to do the job right. We were never given enough resources to properly
establish security, to properly rebuild things, to do anything here
properly. Want the job done right? Lets fucking do it. Give us the
men and equipment, the doctors and soldiers and engineers and teachers
we need to secure Afghanistan, to rebuild Afghanistan, to heal Afghanistan,
to teach Afghanistan, and then we can win, and then we can come home.
Stop trying to bring me home before I'm done.
This is what I do for a living.
This is my job,
my profession,
my specialty.
Trust me.
Give me the tools I need and we can win this war.
Give me the committed men I need.
Make sure they receive the very best training.
Give me the equipment I need.
Take care of my family while I'm over here.
Give me the resources to secure,
to rebuild,
to heal
and to teach.
And I will come home.
And I will bring you a victory
we can all be proud of.