Mary Beth Harrell's Weekly Diary

It's up at TexasTuesday's, Soldier’s Mom/Congressional Candidate: “How Bush Divides Us.”. Mary Beth is encouraging comments to the entry:

In my last post I wrote that our son, Rob, had just been deployed to what my husband and I now know is a meaningless war in Iraq. Funny thing: my husband, Bob, bristled when he read the word “meaningless.” He challenged me about it and we argued. I was genuinely confused because I thought we’d agreed about that. Then I realized this is how the Bush Administration divides us from one another in their public relations war. Let me explain.

I wasn’t raised in a military family; Bob was. Bob’s dad was an orphan who made the Army his home. He fought in the Pacific in World War II and retired as a command sergeant major. Bob is a retired Army warrant officer. Our oldest boy, Rob, enlisted in 1995, right out of high school. Our youngest, Josh, enlisted in 1998, after a year of college.

Like so many, we believed the President that Iraq posed a threat to our security. But before the President proclaimed “mission accomplished,” Bob began to have his doubts. He began to tell his closest friends that he feared this was going to be another Vietnam. As the insurgency grew, he knew he was right.

Now he has another great fear: that our son will be hurt or killed fighting an unwinnable, unnecessary war. How does any mother or father live with the possibility that their son died in a meaningless war? That their son’s death served no national purpose? That their son answered his country’s call out of a sense of duty, honor, and love of country and his life was carelessly wasted by those who sent them there?

The war is meaningless; the service is not. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” That passage from the John resonates in a soldier’s heart like no other.

But when the only meaning one can find in this national undertaking is the commitment of our soldiers to each other, it’s time to say “enough.”

That’s why I’m running for Congress–because it is my duty as a citizen to stand up and say “enough.” To echo the words of Jack Murtha, “Our military's done everything that has been asked of them. [The] U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily; it's time to bring the troops home.”

It's up at DailkKos as well, feel free to post there too.