Dear Friends:

    Below is a letter that Nancy and I have sent to President Obama regarding the situation in Afghanistan. We hope that you will add your voices to the call for an end to the occupation in Afghanistan. Please feel free to forward our letter to any and all.

          In peace and solidarity
          Charley Richardson and Nancy Lessin
          Co-Founders, Military Families Speak Out

November 23, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

As you prepare to announce a new strategy for Afghanistan that could mean deploying tens of thousands more of our loved ones to fight a war with no foreseeable end, we call on you to terminate the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, bring our troops home now, and ensure they get the care they need when they return. We urge you to stop billions more from being misspent overseas to misuse young men and women and instead utilize those funds to help overcome the pressing domestic issues of our time; a growing population of veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, a fractured health care system, and a woeful economic climate all desperately demand your attention and action. 

Our family is intimately connected to these issues. My husband, Charley Richardson is slowly but surely dying of an aggressive, metastatic cancer, and dealing regularly with the fractured and overstressed medical system. He also lost his job of twenty years at a state university last April as a result of recession-related budget cuts.  And our son served one deployment in Iraq as a Marine and was sent to Afghanistan twice after he joined the private army of contractors that is so central to the war efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We are acutely aware of how political will has been so wrongly misdirected toward military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of achieving economic recovery and sorely needed healthcare reform at home.

We were fortunate. Our son returned to us in good physical health and we were able to hold him in our arms and not just keep him in our hearts. So many of our friends within the organization we co-founded, Military Families Speak Out, have not shared this outcome. Their loved ones returned in flag-draped coffins; or with life-altering physical wounds; or with the hidden, often deadly, psychological injuries of war.

We hope you will think again about the faces of the families that you saw when you were at Dover, and the faces that won