VFW Post 7721

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Text Box: Senior Vice Commander Bill Barchers Veterans For Veterans When I returned from deployment in 2005, I had spent the last four years out of the country. While not all of it was in Iraq, I felt proud and confident that we had done something really right. Our initial success in Afghanistan was actually better than any textbook I had ever read. Our dominance during the “stalled” three week destruction of the Iraq’s standing Army (the fourth largest in the world at the time) came at an extremely low cost in American and civilian Iraqi lives. I was proud of what we had done. I was proud of Special Forces, and I was damned proud of this country. I thought I could see a period of reconstruction and nation rebuilding in the future of Iraq and the American forces. Since I had always avoided that kind of stuff, and since I was two years over the retirement age anyway, I went ahead and submitted my paper work. We had lost a few guys, each of them a friend. Worse, some of them I had put on the bird. Then later that year the news media began to step its criticism of the war. From my foxhole, that emboldened the bad guys and they stepped up the insurgency and many, many more guys and girls started to die. 6280 American fighting men and women died in the War on Terror. It is the ninth largest American combat death rate in our history. Only the ninth. But our Army is so small. The majority of the initial fighting was Special Forces, so I knew so many. Only the ninth. Viet Nam was the fourth highest. WWII was the second highest. The American Civil War was, by far, our costliest with 720,000 deaths. I didn’t know it at the time, most of you didn’t know it either when you came back, but we returned different. I remember feeling like I would never feel anything again. I was angry that everything here was a mockery of the men and women living in the sand. Young men and women getting so sick at breakfast they would throw up twice before having to make their twice daily “routine” convoy drive from Camp Freedom to Camp Victory. They lived one place and worked at another. None of the civilians I saw here each day had any idea what it could possibly mean to say, “I am dying to go to work today”. I could not believe that no one else I ran into on the street knew what the desert smelled like or knew how silent their noisy world was without diesel generators in the background. I remember coming home and listening to CNN’s highly experienced, highly knowledgeable, embedded reporters telling us all how it really was. And the rage grew. I almost killed a NY lawyer one night in a bar when he started spouting off to his friend about what a moral outrage the war was. I just blacked out, and the poor dumb bastard was laying there, unconscious, bleeding. He didn’t even know what happened. I never had a chance to explain it to him. Only the ninth. It doesn’t really matter, does it? The ninth or the first. Pain is pain and guilt is guilt. “Guilt for what I’ve done, Guilt for living, Guilt for friend Buck’s 21 year old son” A Viet Nam veteran got me out of that bar that night. But he made me go to the VFW the next day. He didn’t say much. He didn’t preach to me or tell me anything was wrong with me. He just bought me beer while he drank sprite. I think he may have saved my life…maybe he just kept me out of prison. I don’t know, but I know the VFW was my medicine…my treatment. This organization is unique. Sometimes I think in the routine of running our meetings, politicking our politics, and eating fish on Fridays we may forget why we are here. We are here because of who we will never be again. We are each other. This is the only place I ever feel completely relaxed, like I don’t have to hide who I am. This past Friday night I was a Pool Committee social dinner. One of the ladies asked for a war story. None of you ever have. Yet you understand and laugh when I think up some whopper to tell. Veterans helping Veterans…in ways only veterans can. As we remember our dead this Memorial Day let’s look at each other, drink a few too many, spill a little for those who couldn’t make it this year, and let’s remember each other.

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Volume 5 issue 11