Into the Valley of Death-Scott Weglarski

The Trojan war from the Iliad seems eerily similar to the account to the battles in Afghanistan. To me, the Afghan people seem more like the soldiers from the Iliad, taunting the American soldiers and fighting like everything they have could (and will) be lost. The stone houses they mentioned also stuck out to me as being familiar from the Iliad. The wall around Troy withstands any and all of the Greek's attacks, no matter what they throw at it. Another similarity I found between these two accounts of war are the reasons for the fighting. In the Iliad, it's a "noble rescue of Helen" by Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon. An underlying and more important reason for the cause of the war is simply pure greed. Troy is a rich city; I want it. The same goes for the Americans in Afghanistan. It's a good cause to protect foreign nations from the threat of dictatorship and terrorist organizations, but is it really the whole reason why we're there? And is it really worth starting a full scale war over? Soldiers like the ones mentioned in the article have seen and experienced the horrors of war because of this conflict with Afghanistan. Even if they came back relatively unscathed physically, how could you possibly hope to help the mental trauma caused by the war? Greeks and Trojans alike have watched their friends die around them, horrible, gruesome deaths. They fight over the bodies of the fallen. One part in the article I also found quite like this was the portion where a soldier named Miguel Gutierrez was apparently hit, and the American soldiers went into a frenzy of activity to save him. He ended up just breaking a leg from a fall, but I think it's the thought that counts.