Some local veterans oppose exit time limit

[cato2]

Some local veterans oppose exit time limit
By Jeff Wright
The Register-Guard
Published: Sunday, March 19, 2006



Peace activists have long said we need to bring the troops home. These days, so do some conservative politicians and pundits, and, according to one recent national poll, a majority of soldiers still fighting in Iraq.
But for many local veterans who've been there, the idea of America packing up and leaving anytime soon is as appealing as encountering a roadside bomb.

"I would be very adamant that you should not put a time limit on it," said Pete Salerno, who lives in Monroe and works at Oregon Army National Guard headquarters in Cottage Grove. "Once you do that, the bad guys just have to outwait you."

Salerno, a battalion operations sergeant with Charlie Company in the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry, returned from Iraq last April. One of his strongest memories, he said, is of the 40 or so Iraqi interpreters he worked with when citizens went to the polls to vote in a democratic election for the first time in their lives.


Many of the interpreters, grown men, were in tears, overcome with emotion at seeing their countrymen participate in such an exercise.
Salerno believes the election planted a seed that insurgents in Iraq musn't be allowed to unroot. "We can fight an insurgency and we can prevail, but it takes time," he said. "Americans are pretty dang impatient."
But Salerno's and other local veterans' views may not jibe with those still in Iraq, according to a recent Zogby International poll of soldiers fighting there.

Nearly three in four - 72 percent - said the United States should exit the country within a year, and more than one in four said U.S. troops should leave immediately.

Soldiers in Iraq offered a host of reasons for why some citizens back home oppose the war: a lack of patriotism, a lack of understanding of the need for U.S. troops to be there, a belief that continued U.S. occupation won't work or opposition to any military action in a pre-emptive war.
Rob McCan of Creswell, who served in Iraq in 2003 as a Marine Reserve, says the latter comes closest to explaining why so many gathered in Eugene on Saturday to protest the war.

"I believe a lot of them were brought up or converted to the ideals of the peace movement of the 1960s - that no war is a good war or justified war," said McCan, 26.

"I think they need to look back throughout history and realize that not every aggressive action or defensive action is evil or wrong."
McCan, who works at a group home for developmentally disabled adults, said he believes he was in Iraq for multiple reasons: to prevent Iraq from funding al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists, to spread democracy and to avenge the first President Bush's failure to dethrone Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War.

For all of those reasons, McCan doesn't support immediate troop withdrawal.
"I do think the war should end, and it will end," he said. "But they need to keep us there until the job is done to make sure it's done right."
For McCan, the war continues to be personal. Occasional flashbacks, for example, can be triggered by certain sounds: "When a new front-loading washer goes into spin cycle, it's remarkable how much it sounds like an M-1 tank starting its engine," he said.
McCan, who married one month before deployment, said.

his war experiences also contributed to his impending divorce. "It really made me a different person than when I left," he said. "Different world views, different opinions, different thoughts and ideas and behaviors."
Stephanie Hibdon, 22, returned home last month after completing a four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force. The Eugene native was stationed in Iceland, Germany, Turkey and Iraq.

Like Salerno, Hibdon said many of her memories of Iraq are positive, such as giving away pencils and T-shirts to Iraqi schoolchildren. She said she used to believe that she was there because of Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but not anymore.

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