Small pictures.

The image below is linked to a larger image but before clicking through be sure to read the entry below it.



I came across this website over the weekend. The website is called nowthatsf*ckedup.com. It’s basically a porn site in that it has pix of wives and girlfriends, pretty standard stuff. I’m sure everyone will be shocked that men actually like to look at pictures of naked women. Here’s the hook though, the site gives service personnel serving in combat free access in return for posting pictures taken during the course of combat ops.

Now, I think a lot of people here at home have this somewhat sanitized view of war and that’s a bit of a problem. I’ve seen some fairly gory things during the course of life even if I never worked as a part of the PD or EMS.

Three things that come to mind are:
1) Finding a detached limb while working at a metro area beach.

2) Seeing a women get decapitated right in front of me while walking along a Manhattan street.

3) The overall carnage surrounding a 30 plus vehicle accident that I was in the middle of but managed to walk away from totally unscathed.

My point is, I still carry these things around with me to this day. However, as gory as these things might have been, they pale by comparison to what a generation of Americans are experiencing on a daily basis in the service of this country. The reason this comes to mind is a conversation I had over the weekend with my friend Kevin. Summed up, it was about the current state of affairs domestically in this country and a general dissatisfaction with the direction our leadership has taken us.

Kevin expressed a very genuine fear whatever damage our nation incurred over these two terms of faltering stewardship would wind up being irreparable. I don’t think that’s the case though. First off, we’ve suffered through far worse during the course of the nation’s history. Second, there is going to be a generation of people who will be returning from all over the world after having served their country - in general, these will be people of conviction and a strong sense of what they think our country should be. These veterans will not suffer the fate of the Vietnam era veterans in that their contribution will be diminished because of an errant foreign policy decision. They will return, perhaps jaundiced by what they have seen, but determined to return to a society worth their efforts.

I imagine many of the next generation of leaders may in fact come from their ranks.

Kevin had referenced the movie Wall Street as a point in our society when the prevalent view of the rich changed (greed is good). Something we can recognize when The Apprentice or Survivor are the popular entertainment of the day. The question is can we really believe a generation of returning veterans who embraced the concept of personal sacrifice, will not challenge the values of an ethically vague society where greed is promoted as a positive trait?