Tuesday Post for Peace #2

(1,000,000 blogs for peace.org)

'kay... I'm barely awake and not a happy camper this morning, having awakened to discover that my cellphone service has been "interrupted" despite the fact that I made an online payment yesterday (when the hell is technology gonna catch up with itself??).
It didn't help, I'm sure, to be assaulted by the fetid odour of dog shit as I heated my coffee and fed the parrots while the insidious knowledge that all was not well in Thorneshouse insinuated itself into my consciousness via olfactory alarm. A lovely pile awaits my courage yet, which has me grumpy and dreading my living room.
Anyway, this is the One Million Blogs for Peace Post, so I suppose I oughta get "peaceful" and post!

I'm struck more than anything today, after Memorial Weekend, at the hopelessness and helplessness most of our Warriors must be feeling right now. I'm going to call our troops/soldiers/people "Warriors" from now on, I think.

I know that probably sounds crazy, being a peace person and against this war, but I'm just gonna feel my way through this (because it has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with feelings).

I've been ambivalent about the term "Troops" for as long as I can remember. First of all, it always evoked thoughts for me of either a "group"; like a "troop of jugglers", or of an old TV sitcom called "F troop" (I think). Not being a military person, a war monger or strategist, I always though "troop" was a plural term; referring to many - not one.
I thought it combined the one into many, like, I suppose a "unit" or something.
I was pretty okay with referring to our Warriors as "Troops" when I though it unified them in some way. When I thought it made "many" of "one", united by their commonality. It kinda seemed a little okay to refer to these people this way, if it expressed that - their togetherness; ya know?
When I realized the word referred to each person in an individual way, while taking away their individuality all at the same time it kinda freaked me out. Okay, okay, I know... can't call them "soldiers" (I think that's army?) and marines are marines and sailors are sailors and air force are... ? Patriots doesn't work for many reasons, a few being that most of those people over there, our Warriors, aren't feeling too patriotic these days, as well as the word's inference to some other political crap having to do with revolution and resistance and stuff like that...
So what I've come to is my choice of the word "Warrior".

Wikipedia gives us this:

A warrior is a person habitually engaged in warfare. In tribal societies engaging in endemic warfare, warriors often form a caste or class of their own. In feudalism, the vassals essentially form a military or warrior class, even if in actual warfare, peasants may be called to fight as well. In some societies, warfare may be so central that the entire people (or, more often large parts of the male population) may be considered warriors, for example in the Iron Age Germanic tribes or the Medieval Rajputs.

Professional warriors are people who are paid money for engaging in military campaigns and fall into one of two categories: Soldiers, when fighting on behalf of their own state; or mercenaries, when offering their services commercially and unrelated to their own nationality. The classification of somebody who is involved in acts of violence may be a matter of perspective, and there may be disagreement whether a given person is a hooligan, gangster, terrorist, rebel, freedom fighter, mercenary or a soldier.

I won't argue. All I can say is that if our people over there are have a group with which they can identify, a family, so far away from their homes and family, then "Warrior" is as good a family as any.
I think my love for this term comes from a book I read many years ago, entitled The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. It speaks to the warrior in all of us; that noble heart who wills change and is willing to fight for it. Our warriors began this war in Iraq fighting for an ideal. That ideal has been shattered beyond repair in most of them by now; yet still, they must fight.
So let them be Warriors of Peace, because they are fighting in their own hearts and souls with every step they take... every breath.
And bless their hearts. Every damned one of them.