Death, War, and Peace
Please keep the family of 1LT Neil Santoriello in your prayers. He was killed on August 13th in Iraq. LT Santoriello was the Gold Bar recruiter at Dickinson my freshman year and a really good guy. He gave me my first APFT and after failing miserably, he reassured me with a smile that it's really easy to get better (and he added on that his first APFT ever was somewhere around 80 points too). It's sad enough that a 24 year old dies. It's worse that he had a baby on the way. I just feel really sad about it. War doesn't seem to be real until it affects you or someone you know personally. And I just think of that baby who will grow up never knowing his/her daddy... 12 years after my mom died, I still tear up when people talk about her. But I had 8 and a half good years with her and I feel blessed for that. It just makes me want to cry to imagine Brian going off to war in a year or so and leaving me alone. Fucking war. Not just this war, but war in general. Sometimes I wish I could just fall asleep and wake up in a new and peaceful world. There was some quote written in the MOUT site that I was at this summer. It said something like: "Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice." That's the kind of peace that I'd like to have.