A Shelter Island Marine responds to helicopter letters

This is in regards to Mr. (Mel) Mendelssohn and Ms. (Jean) Lawless’ letters on August 16.

Mr. Medelssohn wrote about what he called “the no-win humiliations of Iraq and Afghanistan.” But excuse me Mr. Mendelssohn, have you ever been to Afghanistan?

Because I was there from October 2011 to May 2012. I was there interacting with the locals of Afghanistan, and I know from personal experience that they want us there. If you could see the look on their faces when we would patrol past them you would know that it is not a “no-win war.”

I have built schools for their children, arrested the drug dealers, bombmakers and murderers of Afghanistan. And to me that is winning the war.

You saying those things sounds like you are telling me that I am not doing my job. How would you like it if I told you that you were doing your job all wrong?

The second best day of my entire life is when I got onto the so called “instrument of death,” and left my Patrol Base in the middle of Afghanistan to fly to a nearby base so that I could finally go back home. The first would be the day that I arrived back home to Shelter Island and my family and friends were all waiting for me. I didn’t join the Marine Corps because I had to. I joined because I thought it was my patriotic duty to do so.

There will always be people who do not agree with the war or what our military is doing. But take a walk in my boots and you’ll see the world the way I see it.

Walk thousands of miles through the deserts and towns of Southern Afghanistan, and tell me that you still do not agree with what we are doing.

Sincerely,
LCPL Mundy, Michael

Editor’s Note: Lance Cpl. Mundy left the following message on The Reporter’s Facebook page Sunday morning. The letters he was responding to are copied below.

Another reminder

To the Editor:

Now that we are finally extracting our precious troops from the no-win humiliations of Iraq and Afghanistan, do we need another reminder of the embarrassment of our defeat and withdrawal under fire from Vietnam in 1975?

Who can forget the front-page photos of American helicopters on the roof of our Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) embassy as we evacuated our staff and abandoned many of our loyal allies? The idea of landing a Vietnam-era Marine helicopter on Fiske Field (or anywhere else on Shelter Island) would, in my humble opinion, constitute a symbolic insult to the millions of Americans whose peaceful protests brought our ill-conceived and insensitive involvement in Vietnam (which cost us 58,000 American lives) to an end.

Surely, the proponents of this ill-advised and insensitive concept can find less provocative and more positive ways of honoring a fallen soldier than by turning Shelter Island into a memorial to defeat and disillusion, and more importantly, a staging area for further military recruitment of our most treasured possessions, our unsuspecting young.

MEL MENDELSSOHN
Shelter Island

Instrument of death

To the Editor:

Why we would land a helicopter (in this case an instrument of death) on Fiske Field would be a thought-provoking question to ask the people of Shelter Island.

And another: Is this the only way to memorialize a young man, now one of over 6,000 servicemen and women dead from war in Iraq and Afghanistan?

And: Is the landing of such aircraft meant to be an incentive for supporting our wounded 500,000 and counting, as PTSD and deep psychic wounds surface?

And: Is Fiske Field not a place for the gathering of people celebrating sports?

And one more: How many Iraqis and how many Afghanis were on the planes that flew into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania?”

JEAN LAWLESS
Shelter Island