Fighting for an America That Long Ago Ceased to Exist

My childhood was a series of toy soldiers, G.I.Joe’s, and child sized rifles, playing army with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. I still have a photograph of my six-year-old self with my friend Butch Lewis, me dressed in my uncle’s paratrooper gear and him wearing his father’s Marine Corps helmet, smiling broadly on the driveway, miniature versions of our future selves.

A little more than a decade later I was in the 82nd Airborne as an infantryman and Butchy was a jarhead.

My whole family line was polluted with one legged men, battle scarred veterans and the walls of the houses hung with photographs of young, uniformed men who never came back at all. And still I joined.

Looking back as an old man now I can only hang my head in shame for having been so stupid, so gullible, so easily led to do things I can never make right because of a flag, or the dream of an America that has long ago ceased to exist. Whenever someone tells me thanks for your service, it stings.

There is a reason the system continues to run no matter how corrupt, how broken, how disreputable it becomes and that is the misapplied intentions of the young who want more than anything to simply be like the men in their own families and to defend the good lives their people made for them.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/11/19/fighting-for-an-america-that-long-ago-ceased-to-exist