A wide awake reader sent me this:

I got the company newsletter about five days after I started working at my new job. The front page of it dealt with one of the guys who
works here, his reserve unit was called up,and he’s been serving in
Iraq for the last few months. Just last week he got his first leave
and came home.

The article then continued, listing employees who had a family member
serving in Iraq and Afganistan. From what I remember, we’ve got about
a dozen of those. There’s a pretty good spread too. From the lowest
manual labor job, up through managers and Department heads, there are
folks who’ve got a son, or brother, or husband serving in a war zone.
That’s what made what I saw later the same day all the more amazing.

I’m working on a system, and then I notice the corkboard behind this
chick’s desk. She’d just put up a large poster, using the same color
scheme and logo that the Army uses for their recruiting. The poster
was of a cemetery. Rows and rows of headstones. The caption?

“You can’t be all that you can be if you’re DEAD.”

I walked over, and took a closer look. The message underneath
basically said, “You can serve your country, and get money for college
in ways besides serving in the military.”

Nice. Just nice.

Now notice, this isn’t a poster saying the war in Iraq is wrong.
People can disagree about that. I personally stay up some nights
wondering if those people over there are worth one drop of American
blood. Like I said, people can disagree about policy, that’s America,
Jack.

This was a poster encouraging people not to enlist in the military.
This is also a poster, the subtext of which states, ‘If you serve in
the armed forces, you’re a moron. You’re also probably going to die.”

There are people not three desks from where this…individual…sits
that have loved ones serving over there. She posts a poster of a
giant cemetary which implies this is where a soldier or marine will
most likely end up.

That’s so classy!

Tell me that part about how the left supports our troops but not the war again?

Let me break this down for you, honey. If it wasn’t for that ‘moron’
slinging a rifle and guarding your freedom, if it wasn’t for that hick
planted in that cemetary that your friends photographed, you wouldn’t
have the freedom to ‘be all that you can be’.

Then again, I’ve met you. You didn’t turn out to be much.

Sometimes I think it must really be nice to live in a “reality” where the military serves no purpose. A “reality” where no one would attack you if you could not defend yourself. A “reality” where terrorists did not crash planes into buildings thinking we had grown weak and soft and would not have the will to strike back.

To bad for the rest of us who must live in a world where difficult choices must be made in the interest of security and where freedom is never free. We have our compensations though. Like a dedicated, professional, all volunteer military who is out there protecting us from evil doers who would see us dead or enslaved. We can sleep safe and secure in our beds each night because these brave men and women are on the job. Hell, maybe we can even have dreams of alternate realities, just like the woman described above. Of course, we will wake up free and give a prayer of thanks for the people who sacrafice so much to make that possible.

And that’s my reality.

UPDATE: Found this quote over at FlightPundit. Thought it fit nicely here:

“the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

Samuel P. Huntington