The following letter I recieved in email second? third?  or thousandth hand?  I do not know. I have no idea who wrote this  but I felt we needed to share this.  

Hearing bombast in the music of a people trapped by war, I couldn't help thinking of the young warriors 8,000 miles away on a mission for America that has never been darker. And I wondered at the growing disinterest in a peace movement beyond Cindy Sheehan that would bring our armies home.

I decided that most Americans just cannot empathize with those at war, because they've never been in one. They know it only through the sophistry of self-sustaining politicians, or in the false bravado of screeching hawks. So I've composed the four phases of combat as a reminder of what exists beyond the glow of secular nationalism.

Phase One is the aura of invulnerability that accompanies young warriors as they stride off to battle, a feeling that protects them from distant realities. Dying, they will tell you, is the fate of someone else, not them. They will remain untouched by the bullets and shrapnel that shape the economy of their embattled lives.

Phase Two is when death nudges closer, taking a friend who has suffered next to them through months of combat training, a brother in arms alive one moment and gone the next, like the transitory drift of a passing cloud. A soldier new to war's caprice is suddenly transformed by the silence of the dead, and the emptiness of death's eyes.

Phase Three embraces the terrible knowledge that it can happen to you, that eternity rides on the winds of combat's shifting fortunes, hovering over landscapes that war morphs into graveyards. It is a fearful and lonely realization, the facing of one's mortality, and it comes, as knowledge often does, at the price of an easy mind.

Finally, Phase Four. This is not, as you might suppose, death or injury, because they fall into a category of their own. Soldiers and civilians lie side by side in the awful unity of silence and pain, either beyond eternity or walking proof of combat's violence. Wearers of the Purple Heart will live to relive their agony, and those untouched by bullets or shrapnel will join them in the view, because that's what Phase Four really is: memory.

Recall is the aftermath of war that wounds the soul, and a veteran can never again walk free from the shadow it casts. War reminds its aging sons what it was like to be death's companion. The memories come in nightmares that gallop through the darkness, or in flashes of horror that fire through the head at unexpected moments; while driving, while dining, while listening to music, while playing with children, while watching a movie, while making love.

Surviving war is only a part of coming home. Memories of incidents too hard to bear attend each warrior who slips once more into civilian life. The darkness will eventually also encompass those closest to him, so that the victims of war will increase exponentially to include an entire culture, sharing pain's physiology with the young who once marched away and who now straggle back.

They — we — share the music of America in different ways, adding to an anniversary observed with flags and bugles by reminding those clapping to the beat of anthems that the downside of patriotic music is often a moan.

Listen closely and you'll hear the discord of human pain trailing through compositions that stir the soul. The last bugle to play will sound taps. It will be as much for a culture diminished by war as it is for a soldier who dies in one.