Guy Baxter has written a very thoughtful and provocative letter about his and other soldiers’ combat experience in Iraq (“Regarding Code Pink,” April 26).
May I add some thoughts to this letter as the author of “Whatever happened to Code Pink?” (April 19).
Although most women cannot fathom what goes on in war, it is our policy, as members of Code Pink, to not raise our children to kill another mother’s child.
Mr. Baxter gives us an account of what it is like to be a “liberator,” but he does not tell of the thousands of lives lost with that liberation or the devastation to a country that actually had not attacked us nor did anything to require our bombing, maiming, and killing innocent civilians. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator and there are many more around the globe, but I do not see us going to these places in the guise of “liberation.”
I may have not seen combat, but I was a military wife for 25 years and watched my husband die an untimely death from Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) from the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange, which still, to this day, affects the lives of millions of Vietnamese people as it still resides in the water table there because it is non-soluble.
So, Mr. Baxter, before you assume you know about a woman’s organization that is against the dehumanizing effects of war, a men’s business, please give us credit for doing more than “dropping our underwear.”
— Victoria Grostick – San Luis Obispo
This article appears in May 3-10, 2012.
