154 active-duty US troops killed themselves in the first 155 days of 2012.
Jonathan Bartlett was just one of them. The poor kid died because Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush lied. They lied about 9/11. They lied about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. They lied about Al Qaeda.
They lie because that's all they know how to do. And innocent kids like Jonathan Bartlett, whose only crime was trusting and believing in his lying leaders, they have nothing left to do but die - when they realize the war was just a way for some folks to make a killing.
Jonathan Bartlett lost his legs while fighting as a US army soldier in Iraq. He recovered remarkably well and strove to graduate with a business management degree and then got a job. Two months ago, however, he shot himself while in the shower, leaving a message to his friends and family saying that he wanted to be forgotten...
[Source: Aljazeera. First posted 9 June 2012]
to take his own life cos he was hurting is one thing but to make a final wish to be forgotten is heart wrenchingly unacceptable. Truth gives?
ReplyDeleteIt's sad. And unconscionable.
ReplyDeleteJonathan Bartlett
I know what it is to be tired,
tired of things going wrong,
tired of pain, tired of making sacrifices that nobody appreciates, tired of a country pretending that the wars it fights are not happening, tired of struggling against enormous odds, tired of being disappointed and unsupported when you need it most. I know these things. I'm sorry that you knew them, too, and that you felt them so deeply that you chose to end your life. You won't be forgotten. Your life had meaning, and perhaps your spirit will yet guide others to make different choices than you did, to decide not to fight or to serve a country in wars that are not right. You paid too high a price for your naive patriotism, for your failure to seek the truth about 9/11. And perhaps that was the death blow for you, to realize that you'd been duped.