Michael Yon
Facebook
11/15/2012
This officer served in Afghanistan. I publish his email with permission, but withhold his name for obvious reasons. PLEASE FORWARD THIS ONE:
Michael,
…the election has put a damper on my motivation to contribute. What I would really like to write about is the loss of faith and confidence in our administration and I found myself seriously considering resigning my commission last week and I haven’t spoken to a single one of my peers that doesn’t feel similarly.
I am very concerned that we’re reaching a point where many people like me are seriously questioning why they would risk everything in defense of a country that they no longer recognize and in service to an administration that will sacrifice American lives and careers for politics without batting an eye. But of course I can’t really write about that until I retire next year.
Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, but the debacle in [Afghanistan], 10 years of General and Flag officers failing to lead us, sequestration, the discussions about significantly scaling back retirement benefits for military members and the significant decrease in funding available for training, leads me to believe that we are facing a perfect storm that will decimate morale and will cause a massive exodus of the good people from military service.
I think there are a lot of us who feel betrayed by a clueless, selfish nation that thinks that because they say “thank you” to a veteran from time to time, we will continue to do the heavy lifting and they can keep maxing out the credit card at the mall. That scares the hell out of me.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. As always, your thoughts on any of this are of great interest to me…
