``You never miss an opportunity to thank our soldiers for their `service'?!'' I think your friend's not the only nutcase. Carl
-----------
(Since this thread has dragged on, I'll post this. I wrote it right after Carl's, but decided it wasn't worth sending. Changed my mind...)
Shit, Carl, have a heart. If the guy is a friend you leave them alone about it. Back in Vietnam days, I would occasionally run into acquaintances or slightly known friends who were just back from the war and either just got out or were still in. I decided the best policy was to give them plenty of psychological support---basic friendliness, dinner, a place to crash for a few days. It didn't take much to see they had some serious demons to deal with. Some were draftees and others enlisted---but no re-ups.
The deeper point is that most of these guys were politically naive. At eighteen or nineteen who isn't? They didn't understand really when they went, they were not getting out or going anywhere except when and where their COs told them. The few guys I've known since who went to Vietnam never re-enlisted and spent a good year or two getting back into civilian life. One attempted suicide, most did drugs and alcohol to get over it and then had to deal with all that shit a few years later.
Doug writes: ``But even though these guys have gotten fucked over by a lying administration who sent them, under-equipped, into a hideous and pointless war, they don't seem to mind...''
Chances are they will mind when they get out. How they react later will depend on how the war turns out and how it is viewed in another year or two. If it really turns out that we are leaving and this last few weeks was the US turning point, then the fall out will be on the torture, the pointless sweeps, the masses of dead Iraqis and the destroyed country we left. Abu Ghraib will become the icon of Iraq, just as the Vietnamese girl running down the village road with her clothes burned off became the icon of the Vietnam war.
Look at it this way, if families with parents on active duty are living off food stamps, the military sucks big time---and this administration and Congress have made sure it sucks worse.
Even if we got out tonight, it wouldn't be over. This was a real atrocity and the corruptness of it has burned everybody.
The whole dark center revolves around the necrotic sore of its so-called humanitarian mission. Remember we are in Iraq to bring democracy to Iraq right?
``Captain, you've heard of Walter E. Kurtz?''
``Yes Sir, I've heard the name.''
``Luke would you play that tape, please.''
``Yes Sir. These were monitored out of Cambodia. This has been verified as Colonel Kurtz's voice.''
``I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. It's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering along the edge of a straight razor, ...and surviving...''
``Transmission Eleven. Received Sixty-Eight, December Thirty, Zero Five, Zero, Zero Hours, sector Quang to Lu-Quang...''
``...but we must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army, and they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? ... They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful. For those who lie, those nay-balms...I hate them. I do hate them....''
``Walt Kurtz was one of the most outstanding officers this country has ever produced. He was brilliant. He was outstanding in every way. And he was a good man too. A humanitarian man. A man of wit and humor. He joined the Special Forces. After that his ideas, methods, became....unsound...unsound.'' . . . ``Shit. Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500...'' . . . ``Never get out of the boat. Absolutely god damned right... Unless you were going all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fucking program... How did that happen? What did he see during that first tour?... The bullshit piled up so fast you needed wings to stay above it....''