Readers React: Doing right by the soldiers who fight our wars

To the editor: I wept reading about Army Specialist Jayson Morton and his family as he tries to make sense of what he went through in Afghanistan (the lone survivor in an attack on his helicopter) and put his life back together. (“The loneliest war: The sole survivor of a crash in Afghanistan battles to regain his life,” Sept. 13)

My wife and I just watched the 25th anniversary showing of Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” and I’m sure that made the story of this modern-day warrior all the more poignant. Morton deserves to be taken care of financially for the rest of his life, and he and his wife should get the years of counseling they desperately need. Anything less would be a complete abandonment of a young man who was only trying to serve his country.

Have we learned nothing since the men of the blue and the gray were likewise warehoused after doing what they felt was the honorable thing to do? Where is the “new birth of freedom” Abraham Lincoln spoke so eloquently of at Gettysburg?

Maury Mills, Ventura

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