My mom informed me last night that my cousin Carly is leaving for Afghanistan next week. She is an aeronautical engineer with the Canadian forces and has been working on a development team producing new long range missiles. Since our soldiers were deployed before these were designed, she has to go over and train them.

I have mixed feelings on the whole thing. On the one hand I'm thinking, "Oh my god! She's going to Afghanistan!"... but then I think, it's really not any more dangerous then driving your car down the road. The last statistic I heard was that only 24 Canadian soldiers have been killed in 5 years. My mom was kind of freaking out and seemed mad at me that I wasn't more upset. She chose to join the military though. She also chose to be a part of a development team that is creating weapons that could potentially kill thousands of people. She is putting her life on the line, but nobody is making her do it.

I am still dumbfounded that she chose to go into the military in the first place. Carly and I were really close as teenagers, she's only a year older than I am. She was always so bubbly, happy, and just radiated this innocence and sweetness that was just comforting to be around. How does somebody like that decide to develop missiles?

We've grown very far apart now, she's married, lives in Ottawa, and I haven't talked to her in ages so I can't ask why she's made her decisions, or even wish her a safe mission. I hope she comes home quickly and safely and that this whole war would just end already. I think the citizens of Afghanistan have suffered enough already.