In memory those who gave their lives

War is a Nightmare.

Being a soldier is:

Seeing death, destruction and your fellow soldiers dying. It is more difficult then one could ever imagine.

Every day one wakes up not knowing, if they would still be alive at the end of the day.

Soldiers should be remembered with the greatest of respect.

They give their lives, as many around the world have done for each and every war.

There have been too many wars, too much death. They never seem to stop.

The losses because of war are ongoing.

Every day there is a loss of life whether it be soldier or civilian.

When will we ever learn, war is not the answer. Prevention is.

Many wars could be prevented and the political will seems to be weak in the prevention.

Too often it is used to gain wealth, power and control over another nation.

Lives are sacrificed because of lies and propaganda when in reality the problems could and should have been solved in other ways.

To often people jump on the band wagon of war as a solution, not realizing the impact of what war really means.

It means death of many innocent people, destruction of countries, and ongoing hate for years to come.

It means the loss of families, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children, parents and friends.

It means future generations must live with the consequences of the pollution left by deadly weapons, that destroy for years to come.

It means that the one person who may have found the cure for cancer or other incurable diseases may have been killed and hence the cure is lost in the past forever.

Each person has a gift of one sort or another and with each death is lost a gift.

We have lost over the years the potential of millions of gifts.

Close your Eyes and :

Imagine if you can, if John Lennon had been killed in a war, how much we would have lost from his life’s gift to us all. How he has inspired millions around the world. The gift he left us, is wonderful. “Give Peace a Chance”.  John was a warrior a warrior for Peace.

Imagine if you can if James Blunt had died in the war in Kosovo.  We would not have “No Bravery” a heartfelt song about war. His gift of song is beautiful.

Imagine if you can if Cliff Hudson had died,  he wrote the song “Send My Love” for his wife while stationed in Ramadi, Iraq.  He has a special gift. 

It’s hard for many to realize how hard it is for someone when they are in a war zone, but Cliff expresses it so well.

Imagine the children who’s parents came home, how fortunate they are, but what if they didn’t?

Imagine if your son or daughter was lost forever because of war.

What are the gifts they held in their hearts?

What could they have done?  They would have had a future. They could been many things.

Unfortunately their futures were stolen from them and we will never known. 

Imagine the Doctors and Nurses who died because of war. How many lives would they have saved had they not died?

Imagine if you will, that my father had died in the war and I was not here today to share this with you.

Imagine you died because of a war. Think of how many lives you have touched and the simple things that may have changed the life of another. Whether we know it or not, sometimes it is the simplest things that we do, that can change another persons perspective in life for the better.

Be it a poem that touches your heart or a smile to brighten someone’s day.

There are so many ways to impact another life.

I wrote this some time ago for a friend of mine.  He wanted people to know how he saw the children of war.  So he talked about things he saw and how he felt. This I wrote from his memory.  He was my inspiration.

He was a most beautiful man. He had a heart of gold and memories of great sorrow.

There is no glory in war.

Through the eye of children he saw their suffering.

Through his eyes came a child’s cry.

He helped me understand how hard it is to be a soldier.

So in memory of him I will share this with you.

A Child’s Cry

Can you imagine how I see life?

Can you understand what it feels like?

Can you know the agony?

Can you know how often I cry?

Is it so much to want to be happy?

Is it so much to want peace?

Is it so much to ask for love?

Is it so much trouble?

My friends have died.

My life is hopeless.

My relatives are sick.

My home is gone.

I am just a little kid.

I am so scared.

I am not who you think I am.

I am not bad.

Can you imagine how I feel?

Can you understand what I say?

Can you now see why I need help?

Can I tell you I am afraid? I am.

Is it so hard for you to understand?

Is it that I am different?

Is it my religion?

Is it I don’t count?

My memories scare me.

My thoughts are all sad.

My future is short.

My mother always has tears in her eyes.

I am just a little kid.

I am dying.

I am not who you think I am.

I am only kid.

Can you stop the bombs from coming down?

Can you stop the guns?

Can you help my mommy stop crying?

Can you take care of my friends?

It is hard to leave them knowing they are so sad.

It is not my fault.

It is not me who started this.

It is not easy to be a kid sometimes.

He was a Warrior

He was fighting for peace

I can’t find the word just the tear.

When I reached out my hand to you.

You reached back and took mind in yours.

We shared Our happy and sad moments

Your were truly a Special Gift to The World.

Now you are with the Angles.

I Miss you.

I will always “Remember” what you taught me.

It was an honor to know you.

I know you are in Heaven.

Know I am thinking of you.

People come into our lives for many reasons.

Some for a short time, others for life time.

Remember those who died with love and understanding.

Be thankful for those who somehow survive.

They give a gift to each of us, in their own special way.

May we someday find peace.

Let Love be our guide.

Portrait of an Army Cemetery

“Gardens of stone” view at Arlington National Cemetery.  Source

Government issued headstones in Section 60. More photos…

October 15, 2008

Most Americans have never heard of Section 60, let alone visited it. But thanks to filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, you can now get a glimpse of the area in Arlington National Cemetery where the men and women who have died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. “Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery” is the third of a trilogy of collaborations between the filmmakers and HBO that captures the costs of the current wars. “Section 60,” in fact, picks up where “Baghdad ER” left off. The tragic death from shrapnel wounds of 21-year-old Lance Cpl. Robert T. Mininger comes at the unforgettable end of “Baghdad ER.” Their latest documentary opens with a mother visiting the grave of her son “Bobby.” Unlike like the action-packed “Baghdad ER” or the stylized “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq,” “Section 60” offers an almost unmediated view into the lives of the men and women, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, who, week after week, day after day, find solace, community and a place to grieve and visit their lost loved ones in Section 60.

The Emmy-award winning directors are based in New York out of DCTV. They were recently in Washington, D.C., to attend a special TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors) screening of their film at the Navy Memorial. I caught up with Alpert and O’Neill over the phone as they got ready for the screening and talked to me about why “Section 60” matters now, how making this film affected them in a way no other documentary has, and what it’s like feeling “trapped in Section 60.”

“Section 60” aired on HBO on Monday. For more information on when you can watch it, go here.

Katie Halper: Why should Americans care about Section 60 and your film?

Matt O’Neill: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become the background noise in this presidential election. No one is paying attention right now in the mainstream media to the costs that the military and their families are paying day in and day out, whether it’s the 5,000 lives lost or the hundreds of thousands who have spent years away from their friends and families. That’s why we’re proud to be working with HBO and Sheila Nevins to make this film. They’ve consistently brought attention to these issues when the rest of the media is ignoring them. And it’s an important time right now in the context of the presidential elections. Americans need to be paying attention to the two wars that we’re fighting overseas right now and the hundreds of thousands of men and women who are serving the county over there. No matter what you think politically, it’s essential that when you walk into the voting booth on Nov. 4, you remember that the person you’re voting for, whether it’s a congressional or the presidential election, will be deciding whether or not to send men and women to fight wars. We want the film to be watched by tens of millions of people, because that’s the type of attention we want to bring to Section 60. And we told the families, “Let us into your world because we want people to pay attention to it.” We think Section 60 deserves it.

KH: Your war-related recent films were very different. “Baghdad ER” was more dynamic and action-packed. And “Alive Day Memories” was much more stylized. How did this compare to those two experiences?

MO: The reality in “Baghdad ER” is very different than the reality in “Section 60.” In “Baghdad,” we tried to show what it’s like being in an emergency room in a war zone, with tons of action. It’s terrifying … riveting, it reminds you of the costs of the war in a visceral way. “Section 60” had a totally different energy. We’re trying to help the rest of the country enter the world that these families live in every day. The greatest praise that we received thus far was at a screening for a number of the families. Paula Zillinger is one of the mothers in this film; she’s in the first real scene in the film, and she goes to visit her son’s grave. Her son Bobby died in the end of “Baghdad ER.” At the screening, she got up and faced the audience and said, “Welcome to our world.” I hope it brings an audience into the reality that these families are living.

An Interview With the Directors of HBO’s “Section 60”

KH: Was it eerie? Did you feel like you were intruding?

MO: Approaching these families was one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever had to do as a filmmaker because their expressions of grief, their visits to the graves of their lost loved ones, are the most intimate moments you could possibly imagine. And we’re standing there … waiting … with a camera. So the way that we operated was as human beings first, documentarians second. We spent lots of time in the cemetery not filming, talking about why we were doing what we were doing, how we wanted to capture the cemetery as experienced on a day-to-day basis. We wanted to capture their love. And sometimes the first time we spoke to a family, they declined to be filmed. And maybe on the second time we spent a lot of time talking but didn’t film anything, and then maybe on the third time or the fourth time they said, “You know, we would like to be part of this. We would like to be filmed.” And eventually we became part of the fabric of the cemetery. So many of these families are returning week after week or day after day, so we became part of their community.

KH: What was your schedule like?

JA: Basically the schedule was, we were in the cemetery from the opening of the gates to the closing of the gates every single day for almost four months.

KH: What kind of toll did that take on you?

JA: Every American should visit Arlington and visit Section 60. I hope it would have the same impact that it had on us. … When you stand there and see the rows and rows of tombstones stretching toward the horizon, you really realize what the price of war can be — not only these wars but what it has been for centuries. That really goes deep into your being. Section 60 is such an open wound in the families of the fallen. People say, “You’ll get over it. With time you’ll heal.” The loss and the sadness of these families is not healing. That’s another thing we hope America will pick up. Because maybe we’re paying a price for the war in the way it’s affecting our economy, but it’s not something that has an impact. … I mean, people could watch a football game on Monday night instead of watching this documentary. But for these families, their lives have been altered and they will never, ever, ever be the same.

MO: I cried a lot in “Section 60.” I got the sense that a lot of these families were trapped by their loss and trapped by their love that couldn’t be requited, and I felt trapped to a certain extent. Over the course of four months I became somewhat overwhelmed by the sense of loss and the sense that nobody is paying attention. The loss is so profound in Section 60, so tangible. You understand that each of those numbers discussed in the media, whether they were talking about 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, have left a profound sense of emptiness and ripped a hole in the fabric of a community and the fabric of a family. And when I wasn’t there, I wanted to be there, paying respect and honoring the people who are buried there. Because a large swath of the country isn’t and isn’t even aware of it. It’s your responsibility as a citizen, an American, to know what’s happening with our service members overseas. So I became quite depressed at times.

KH: When you were running around doing “Baghdad ER,” you must have had a lot of adrenaline. With this film, the grief is unmitigated, with no action or suspense or chaos to distract you. It affected me, a viewer, in a way that “Baghdad ER” didn’t. How did it affect you as filmmakers differently? And how did it affect the way you filmed it?

MO: There’s very little that distracts these families from their love and their loss. And when they’re in Arlington, that’s a sacred time that they’re spending with their loved ones. There really isn’t anybody else there but the families, their memories, their efforts to celebrate lives lost too soon and, for four months in 2007, Jon and I and our cameras. There was a month where I was filming alone because of certain circumstances, and at the end of that month I was feeling totally crushed. This stuff plays out in slow motion. When you see the same grief, the same wounds that will never heal, acted out day after day after day, you realize it’s a pain that’s never going to go away. Paula talks about going to a meeting of Gold Star mothers (who have lost a child in war), where a mother was talking about her son she lost in Vietnam. And Paula said, “Forty years. I realized that I was going to feel this loss. … I was going to continue to love him for 40 years. It’s something that never ends.”

In the film there are no subtitles, no music, no graphics. You’re just sort of placed in the cemetery as we were for four months, and you begin to get a sense of what it might feel like to be trapped in Section 60.

KH: This film focuses as much, if not more, on the people who are left behind as it does on the people who they lose. You as documentary filmmakers often travel to dangerous places to capture important stories. Did seeing the way people reacted to the deaths of their loved ones, did being surrounded by the grief of those left behind, make you think about your own loved ones who would be left behind if something were to happen to you? Did it make you reconsider the types of projects you’d want to embark on?

MO: One thing, universally, regardless of their political persuasion or feelings on the war, that parent after parent, husband after husband and wife after wife said was, “my loved one died serving the people that he loved and trying to do some good in the world.” I never want to leave any of the people that I love behind. But I also think it’s very important to try to have a positive effect on the world. I think the positive effect that we can have as filmmakers is helping other people understand the world and enter places they couldn’t otherwise enter. Not everyone can spend four months in Section 60. Watching this film and participating in this film is a way to begin to get a sense of what is going on. There are lots of places in the world that we as Americans need to understand a heck of a lot better than we do. I hope this helps inform the American public and helps us understand other people. The better we understand other people, the more likely we are to all work together to build something useful and good.

JA: It compels you to go to the war zones. We’ve been lobbying to go to Afghanistan for three years. HBO is one of the few places that gives you the resources to tell these stories. And if we have a choice between going to Afghanistan and Alabama, we’ll go to Afghanistan. I certainly was left wondering what would happen if I died. What it really made me think about was what I would feel like if my daughter, who is the same age as these soldiers, died. And it haunted me because I saw that … it’s something that you can never be prepared for and something that you can never recover from.

KH: Besides watching the film, what else can people do?

MO: We have almost 200,000 people serving overseas right now. Write a letter saying thank you, send a package. Since the draft ended, only a small portion of American society is participating in war directly. And they’re participating in an enormous way. So many families have sent their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers overseas not once, not twice, not three times, but even four different times. They’ve done four tours of duty in some combination in Iraq and Afghanistan, years away from families and friends and loved ones. It’s important, no matter what your political persuasion, to say thank you.

There are so many families that shared stories with us who are not in the film. We wish we could have included them. We want the whole world to come to Section 60.

The other thing I think about all the time is in Section 60 we’ve lost 5,000 people. The loss that the Iraqi people have suffered in the last five years is horrific. The loss the Afghani people have suffered in the last five years is horrific, and each one of those holes is just as personal and just as deep as they are in Section 60.

Source

Mountain Home National Cemetery

A bit of history om Mountain Home Cemetary
Interments Thru  Year 2007: 12,850

There are also others.

Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemeteries

The VA’s National Cemetery Administration maintains 125 national cemeteries in 39 states (and Puerto Rico) as well as 33 soldier’s lots and monument sites.

Retirement Savings Lose $2 Trillion in 15 Months

By Nancy Trejos

October 8, 2008

The stock market’s prolonged tumble has wiped out about $2 trillion in Americans’ retirement savings in the last 15 months, a blow that could force workers to stay on the job longer than planned, tighten their wallets and possibly further stall an economy reliant on consumer spending, Congress’s top budget analyst said yesterday.

For many Americans, pensions and 401(k) plans are their only form of savings. The dwindling away of these assets — about a 20 percent decline overall — is another setback at a time when many consumers are grappling with higher gas and food prices, more credit card debt, declining home values and less access to loans.

Unlike Wall Street executives, American families don’t have a golden parachute to fall back on,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. “It’s clear that Americans’ retirement security may be one of the greatest casualties of this financial crisis.”

Even defined-benefit, or pension, plans, which are traditionally considered more stable, have been hit hard by the stock market’s volatility, losing 15 percent of their assets over the past year, Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the House panel.

Despite the losses, companies will still be obligated to pay out the same pensions promised to employees but will have to recoup the extra costs in other ways, Orszag said. “When pension assets decline in 401(k) plans, the burden is on the workers,” he said. “When pension plan assets decline in defined benefit plans, the burden is on the firm to make up the difference. The firm will have to pass those costs on to their workers, to their shareholders or to consumers.”

Defined-benefit plans are company-sponsored programs that provide retirement payouts based on an employee’s salary and tenure. The company shoulders the bulk of the investment decisions and risk. Defined-contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, turn those tasks over to the worker and are largely subject to the whims of the stock market.

Increasingly, employers have been switching workers into defined-contribution plans. The federal government has also pushed 401(k) plans heavily, approving a law late last year that makes it easier for employers to automatically enroll their employees in them and other similar retirement plans.

Defined-contribution plans tend to be more heavily weighted in stocks, either through individual holdings or mutual funds. As a result, said Orszag, “the value of assets in defined-contribution plans may have declined by slightly more than that of assets in defined-benefit plans.”

For the first nine months of 2008, the percentage loss in average account balances among 401(k) participants was between 7.2 and 11.2 percent, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute‘s analysis of more than 2 million plans.

Older employees between the ages of 56 and 65 who had the fewest years on the job were the least affected, while those 36 to 45 years old with the longest tenures suffered the steepest declines, said Jack L. VanDerhei, research director for the D.C.-based institute. Younger workers tend to have more stocks in their portfolios while older employees move toward safer investments such as bonds, VanDerhei explained.

The findings exacerbate a complaint among many workers and academics about 401(k) and similar plans that are so heavily tied to the stock market. Are they really the best retirement vehicles for workers?

“The loss of retirement security is a reversal of fortune and the result of very specific flawed governmental policies that have been biased toward 401(k) plans, rather than the result of technological change or the logical consequences of global economic trends,” Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research, testified before the committee.

Other academics and analysts say 401(k) plans are beneficial to employees because they allow them to take control of their retirements.

Jerry Bramlett, president of consulting firm BenefitStreet, said 401(k) participants should resist the urge to pull money out of stocks because that would only lock in their losses.

“Markets do go up and down and 401(k) participants must try to remember to think long-term,” he said.

Many investors have been buying low-yielding Treasury bills in recent months because they are considered less volatile. Bramlett cautioned against that because it would leave them vulnerable to inflation.

That said, 401(k) participants should evaluate their portfolios to make sure their money is spread out among both stock and fixed-income investments. They should also make sure they do not have too much of their own company’s stock.

Public pensions also have suffered. The assets held by state and local governments’ pension plans declined by more than $300 billion between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008, according to the Federal Reserve. About 60 percent of public pension funds are invested in stocks, 30 percent in domestic fixed-income securities, 5 percent in real estate, and the remaining 5 percent in other products.

Miller called the findings “very cataclysmic for middle-class families.”

Several analysts who testified at the hearing said the most vulnerable workers are those nearing retirement, who have large balances in their retirement plans that are now shrinking. Tighter home budgets are also crimping workers’ retirement savings. According to a survey released yesterday by AARP, 20 percent of baby boomers stopped contributing to their retirement plans in the past year because they have had trouble making ends meet.

Already, more and more workers are delaying retirement, a trend that analysts and economists expect to accelerate thanks to the state of the economy. The fraction of people age 55 and older who work full time grew from about 22 percent in 1990 to nearly 30 percent in 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

By 2016, the bureau predicts, the number of workers age 65 and over will soar by more than 80 percent, and they will make up 6.1 percent of the total labor force. In 2006, they accounted for 3.6 percent of active workers.