Dear General Troy,
I read with interest a piece in the Military Times earlier today (“Some Army posts to end individual memorials“) about your brilliant scheme to streamline the memorial services for the fallen from I Corps and Fort Lewis. That’s initiative, exactly the kind of entrepreneurship in challenging times that Dear Leader talks so much about. It’s the kind of outside-the-box (pardon the pun) thinking that has made brought this great nation to where it is today. (No, not “stuck in a quagmire,” I meant that other place.)
But with this unrelenting stream of disappointingly dead soldiers coming back from The Provinces, it obviously makes sense to bundle them up (figuratively speaking — I assume it’ll be a while before we start thinking about buddy body bags) and hold wholesale services. While each one may be worthy of a few individual words of remembrance, the whole point of expendable cannon fodder is lost if it takes too much time and effort to dispose of the duds, if you will. And if 100,000 people can get together in a church in Colorado every Sunday and have an intimate experience with The Lord, then surely ten dead soldiers can share the stage for a bit?
As your spokesman emphasizes, these streamlined services are “a way for the greater Fort Lewis community to come together once a month to honor our fallen warriors.” Indeed. But why stop there? Why not make the monthly gathering a bingo night to honor the dead, or, better still, one huge yard sale for all the stuff they won’t need any longer? Maybe — in keeping with administration policy — the dearly beloved could do their part to support the War on Terror by “clapping louder” while gathered? No one in charge seems to be willing to stop these pesky wars that are, frankly, screwing up everybody’s weekend schedule week after week, not to mention decimating your brigade, so a General’s got to do what a General’s got to do, right?
It’s a fact, sir: a funeral is a bit of a downer, you might say, not only for the bereaved, but for morale as well; it’s definitely nowhere near as much fun as, say, clearing brush in Texas. So it’s really not surprising to find that Dear Leader has excused himself from attending any of the services for the well over 3,000 soldiers killed so far in his less-than-succesful-and-vaguely-pointless-but-quite-costly vanity wars. But that of course makes your tough job of rescheduling the services each month so much easier. And since The White House is doing what it can to limit media coverage of these inconvenient and all-too-frequent embarrassments, they should be very grateful that you’re now making it so much easier for everybody to ignore the harsh reality of the numbers by radically reducing the number of dreary memorial service stories.
Recently, in a drunken stupor moment of candor, Dear Leader announced his intention for us to stay in Iraq for 50 years. So perhaps you should consider cutting back to an annual funeral service to really rationalize the whole mess. And if you combined that with the celebrations on Memorial Day involving lots of soldiers who aren’t dead, perhaps you could help create White House’s fervently desired illusion of no casualties at all?
Sincerely,
