Operation Proper Exit

The pain poked deep as I watched Operation Proper Exit on Sixty Minutes Sunday.

Memories of my own brother's demise in Vietnam in '68 emerged alongside those of men and women who came home from Iraq mangled in mind and body with another kind of war that still haunts, only to feel the need to return to the horror they have to carry.

Tear flowed from returning soldiers. Scott Pelley seemed to be red-eyed also. Who wouldn't be?

Aches from explosions and missing body parts let these soldiers know that something was incomplete for them. Something unfinished, at least that still awakens them in the middle of the night. Or, projecting the unhealed pain on a spouse, a son or daughter.

Tears flowed as I watched and remembered the saga of my brother's death. The hole still festers within.

Closure always seems necessary. For them. For me. For my family who still feel the raw unhealed wound of my brother, Lucas' death.

What for? What for this battle?

I hadn't heard that question since the final days of Eleanor Josaitis when I praised her for yet another award that decorated her hospice room only days before her final breath.

"What for?" she bolted back almost in an angry state of dying at her door.

Pain is never easy. War pain. Cancer pain. Watching someone in pain. Recalling pain.

To experience pain penetrating deep within from battle scars is a different kind of pain, however.

War doesn't have to be.

We can imagine other less primitive ways to settle conflicts.

We must.

Or, we'll keep watching another show like Operation Proper Exit where soldier return to Iraq's hot spots to bring some closure to an ache that will haunt until their own final breath, sad to say.
And, more tales of violence will fill television and one's own pained vision within.