Greg Buckley's Agony
On August 10 this year Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley Jr. was murdered by an Afghan police officer "trainee" in the Helmand Province of southern Afghanistan. The 21 year old Buckley was working out in a gym when the Afghan officer walked in with an AK-47 and discharged the weapon into the unarmed Marine's chest.
Earlier in the year, Buckley was told by a superior officer to apologize to the Afghan trainee after the pair had a dispute over the American presence in Afghanistan. The dispute occurred after the Afghan officer repeatedly pestered and harassed Buckley about the merits of the American mission while Buckley was on a night watch.
On Saturday last week, Buckley's distraught father Greg Sr. finally unloaded over a month's worth of painful but justified indignation concerning his son's death into a letter addressed to "Barack and Michelle Obama."
"As I write this," says Mr. Buckley, "all I can think about is walking my son to the school bus on the first day. As I put him on the bus he said to me 'are you going to be here when I come back?' I replied 'I will always be here for you.' Those are words that repeat in my head, that is why I can never let this go."
Mr. Buckley's heartbreaking sentiments for his son are nevertheless woven into a penetrating and oftentimes scathing critique of Obama's policies and behavior during a year in which over 50 American servicemen have already been murdered by our Afghan "training partners.'
"As an American," says Mr. Buckley, "I am horrified and disgusted that your solution to these insider attacks is to ask our soldiers to be more courteous and polite to these murderers."
Indeed, according to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, "there's a percentage of attacks which are cultural affronts." In other words, American troops will require additional training in cultural sensitivity in order to avoid igniting any potential wrath among the trainees.
For Hoover Institution fellow Paul Sperry, the strategy is rather obvious: "If you don't want to be shot in the back by your Afghan training partners, the Pentagon advises, don't offend their religious sensibilities. Don't kick your feet up on a table, for instance, and never ask to see a picture of their wives and kids."
Sperry's discussions with US Army intelligence officials however reveal a blistering condemnation of the Pentagon's "cultural affronts" argument. Sperry quotes one US official as saying: "the cultural affronts excuse is a bunch of garbage. The Afghans that know we're doing all this PC cultural sensitivity crap are laughing their asses off at our stupidity."
In his letter to Obama, Greg Buckley Sr. wants to know why Obama "is giving billions of dollars to countries that do not respect and appreciate us and our flag, the very flag my son lost his life for."
What's worse, says Buckley to Obama, is that despite the senseless, agonizing loss of life and even more senseless Pentagon reaction to the murders, it's disheartening "when I see the laughter on your face on talk shows or at fundraisers, or even playing basketball on the streets of New York."
As of this writing there is no indication that Barack or Michelle Obama has reached out in any way to Greg Buckley Sr.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said that "there comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it -- the criminal -- and does so honestly and wholeheartedly."
The terrible fallout from this type of decline however includes not only the young, patriotic soldiers sent overseas like Greg Buckley Jr., but the fathers who reared these warriors back home too.