Do You Have Half A Minute?

If someone you love disappears and you never find out what happened to him there is no peace about it. Losing someone to death is hard enough, but missing is not dead. It is just missing.

For decades more than 8,000 men have been missing from the Korean War. My father is one of them. Amidst sightings and intelligence reports and a whole host of other evidence that many of these men were taken to the Soviet Union and never returned, the United States Government did nothing for a very long time. Over the past twenty years there has been an effort in place to gain an accounting. Progress has waxed and waned. Politics get in the way. So do budgets. So does apathy, I’m sorry to say.

People not touched by such a loss likely wonder how and why families would continue to suffer so many years later. My best analogy is a wound that runs deep—one that has been covered over by nothing more than time. Without something to heal the injury, it festers from within.

The Coalition of Families of Korean & Cold War POW/MIAs has drafted an electronic petition asking President Obama to make good on his promise to find out what happened to the men who disappeared while fighting in Korea on behalf of the rest of us. Each time someone signs the petition an email is sent to the White House. I have included a link to the petition below. It takes about thirty seconds to sign and send. Thirty seconds. The missing men and their families have been waiting for sixty years.

Every day this country sends its servicemen and women into battle, asking them to be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Behind their willingness to go forward is the expectation that, if they are captured or if they fall or if they simply disappear, their country will do everything in its power to bring them home, or at least find out what happened to them.

I hope you will join me in asking our government to do what it should have done a long time ago for men who had that same expectation. Men who were let down. 

http://www.change.org/petitions/president-barack-obama-resolve-the-mysteries-surrounding-the-forgotten-men-of-the-forgotten-war?share_id=sbSEzHSpgj&utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition