Letter: Fair reminder of the cost of war

Thank you for the article "When a soldier deploys, his whole family deploys" [News, Nov. 27], which sheds some light on the tremendous emotional suffering of U.S. families whose members are sent to fight in one of our many current wars. Such an article should be published every week to remind us not only about the hardships endured by such families, but of the fact that our country is engaged in so many wars of choice right now.

The wars our soldiers are fighting, whether on the ground or by drone attacks, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Uganda, are wars against countries that do not threaten the existence of the United States, as Japan and Nazi Germany did in 1941, and the USSR did during the Cold War. Rather, like our wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada and Panama, and our proxy war on Nicaragua, these current wars are wars not of defense, but of choice for resources or global hegemony or both.

It would be great for our nation if the families of soldiers about to be sent into the horrors of these wars began to demand of our safe and comfortable politicians the reasons why their relatives must be sent. Perhaps such demands would eventually end U.S. adventurism around the globe and the unnecessary casualties, both U.S. and foreign, that always result from such avoidable imperial wars.

Ed Ciaccio, Douglaston