Can the military be an effective means of social change?

These are some of the beautiful children I got to work with in Athens, Greece at the Athens Refugee Center. From Afghanistan, these children, along with their mothers (and if they were lucky, their fathers) were traveling along the refugee highway, away from the violence that plagued their nation and disrupted their lives.

I heard so many stories of life back in Kabul. Stories that will haunt these children for the rest of their lives. If they were without their father, it was likely that he had been killed by the Taliban, and even worse, that they had been the ones to find him.

I don't promote war. I promote peace. I don't desire violence. I desire stability. But as I got to know these children and listened to their stories, their desire to stay living in their homeland, their desire to live in peace, their desire to remain a family, I couldn't help but feel that the US military had an important role to play in their lives. They needed such a large and quick movement to make the violence and the injustice stop. They needed protection. They needed people to care about their existence.

Before I went to Athens, I spoke strongly against the wars and even protested a few times. Nothing changed. I wasn't going to impact the war, the military, even US foreign policy. Instead I put my energy into writing letters to my classmates serving overseas and learning about the plight of those forced into displacement. And that helped me feel like I was influencing a more positive outcome of this war, but it's not enough.

My generation has come to expect the singing of God Bless, America for the troops in the 7th inning stretch. We expect to see the names of those military personnel lost in the past week on Sunday mornings. We expect to pray for our troops. War has become normal, it's part of our life, it doesn't sting like it should.

We should constantly be weeping at the thought of men and women forced from their families, both as military and as civilians in a war-torn country. We should not want war to last forever. I've come to the conclusion, as Capt. Casey mentioned more than once that the ability of these professionals to impact a very negative situation can be a good and even necessary thing. We need to reign in the length of time and money spent in our endeavors and also recognize a more abstract and strategic approach to how we impact people.

But for me, no matter what, these children deserve to be protected and their life deserves to be valued.