Afraid.

That is what I was on 9/11.

I was scared and I was worried and I was mad and I wanted to do something.

The evil that men do came home to the United States and it was tough to accept.

The Japanese got no closer than Hawaii or Alaska during their attacks in World War II.

Pearl Harbor was an attack on military resources even if it was wrong and sneaky as hell.

Before that maybe we consider Poncho Via crossing the Rio Grande for short attacks on remote areas of Texas.

But that was almost 100 years ago!

Nope 9/11 was an attack on civilians in the real environs of society.

These extremists attacked normal people just doing their jobs and surviving.

This wasn’t an attack on our military Machine, this wasn’t an attack solely on our government,

this wasn’t an attack on any corporation’s ships, oil refineries, manufacturing plants, or any thing like that.

This was blatant murder for the shear joy of doing evil.

Evil that fanatics believe to be god’s will.

The politically spinning by both of our American political parties muddies the waters and not even the most well read, well educated, and discerning voter has a chance of knowing all the facts.

But there are some things that it doesn’t take very much reading to know and understand well.

The facts we do know are these:

Since 9/11 (35 months) there have been no Islamist / Muslim fundamentalist attacks in the United States.

Our soldiers are fighting and killing these fanatics in their part of the world.

It isn’t our civilians.

The collateral damage, to use the terminology of the military is their people, their homes, their businesses and not ours.

Saddam was an evil dictator.

And we must remember when good men doing nothing, evil prevails.

Everyone waited for Hitler to back down because initially it had nothing to do with most of the other European nations.

Then gradually he kept pushing outward till eventually even the US had to be involved.

Militant Islam, the fanatics are real they are attacking and putting our heads in the sand won’t make it stop.

Iraq was a contributor to the problem.

It absolutely supported terrorism.

Why else would we have found a 1300 man camp of Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group in northern Iraq?

These facts are glossed over by the mass media.

While it doesn’t show on CNN,

our soldiers kill lots of their foreign insurgents regularly in Iraq.

It also doesn’t make the news in the US that the Iraqi populace wants to see the fanatics gone from their country.

American soldiers have died.

It is horrible and terrible and there is nothing anyone can say to make it better.

In World War II hundreds of thousands of Americans died because we waited to engage Evil.

We have been at war in Afghanistan now for around 3 years and in Iraq much more than just on year and we haven’t had 1000 deaths in Iraq yet.

The success of our soldiers is great!

Keep supporting the troops and the war effort or accept that evil will come calling again maybe right in Suffolk when we stop confronting it head-on!

For those who say; &uot; It is a war for oil and that’s all&uot;,

well wake up and smell the car exhaust!

We Americans love our cars.

We cry and whine about the economy and the cost of fuel and everything related to oil.

How do you think we get cheap fuel?

It isn’t growing on trees.

If the cost of fuel goes up we complain.

The cost of fuel is tied directly to the events of the world.

A global economy is just that.

It is driven by fuel and world events affect the flow of oil.

If the fanatics are left unchecked, they will stop the flow of oil as they are trying to do in Iraq. The cost of gasoline and heating oil will be half of the working man’s salary and then everyone will be crying about the economy.

We all need to be realistic and less idealistic when it comes to dealing with this &uot;Crisis of our time&uot;.

David Forsythe is a former Suffolk resident and regular News-Herald

columunist.