Bin Laden is Gone!

This is one of those news items where I think it'll just take a while for it to settle in.  Osama Bin Laden is gone.  I should be elated.  9/11 was the Pearl Harbor of my lifetime.  It happened just a couple months after my son was born.  When they were tallying up the dead, I remember sitting on the floor of my living room, watching the news accounts, and weeping.  The senseless death.  The idea that I had brought a baby into such a violent world.

Soon after that, I looked for ways to serve in the military again.  Difficult, given my advanced age at the time.  The era didn't have a "the yanks are coming... over there!" feel to it.  It felt like an era of grim death to me.

Bin Laden wasn't a genius.  He was a man of some wealth with an absolute hatred for the United States who had let his religion fester into an irrepressible hatred.  The worst example of both humanity and of faith.  He had used his many gifts to kill thousands and to inflict pain on countless others.

I know I should feel good about this.  As a former Army Paratrooper, current Navy Officer and citizen of the United States of America.

I just don't.  This is a milestone in the realities of human stupidity and depravity.  Thousands are dead.  Nothing was accomplished by either side.

This is not to say that I don't think the US actions in the war on terror were justified.  In fact, I do.  To a large degree, I think the actions of the Bush administration were reasonable under the circumstances, even though public sentiment on this has swung wildly against them.

It's just that in a world where human beings can cure cancer, create e. coli that secretes diesel fuel, and put men on the moon, we lost so many lives and wasted so many resources on this.  As human beings we're capable of such great things.  That we would use our talents for this?

It's all such a terrible waste.  War always is.

My son woke up this morning, came downstairs and I told him that Osama Bin Laden was dead. 

He had never heard of him.

That, more than anything, is why I wear the uniform.  So, my son can live in a world where Osama Bin Laden just isn't part of his reality.

Good riddance, Bin Laden.  Your life wasn't worth the life of a single soldier, or even of one of your misguided pawns.  It most certainly wasn't worth the lives of the thousands of people you killed.

Maybe I'm feeling numb because I know this doesn't fix anything.  There'll be another Bin Laden.  There will be people so violent and hate-filled that they will attack either us or other innocent people across the world. 

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.  I'm not celebrating, today.  I'm just feeling the weight of that price.