``In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort..''
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I don't mean to sound too cynical, but why is this news? I could already figure this out after reading the WWI English war poets in high school.
And, then there is this big re-adjustment, just getting out. The war stuff is an added extra. Treating individual soldiers isn't going to help. The reason is that all the lies are still intact. The whole policy apparatus is a lie. The country as a whole still believes in some grand plan.
So that means that there is a social denial going on to meet the troops coming back. We meaning the country looks strange to them, because we are strange. It's just they think they are crazy, so they go crazy. Their real experiences run up against the big lie, so those experiences are betrayed through a social denial. It's a whole system of denial. What the soldiers probably don't know, it's only parts of the older anti-war crowd who might even understand some part of their trip.
This country probably will never get healed. It denied Vietnam until that war just faded from social memory. These days the crashed economy and its spreading social misery have gone a long way toward erasing the wars.
And then too, this is now a volunteer military, which makes everything worse. It means that a lot of soldiers expected to build their lives around the military. When they get fucked up, they were stuck. And there is a great temptation to say and for them to believe, it's their own damned fault. Their planned life is dead. They don't know what to do. Nobody cares what happens to them including the government and military.
What they don't realize is that nobody cares what happens to anybody else in or out of the military. The individual responsibility line, covers everybody. Look at the whole sweep of government policies. Think about the ludicrous `healthcare' system, which includes the VA and Medicare.
The whole apparatus of the society has destroyed any attempt to develop a social consciousness---whatever that used to mean. That construction was part of all the various political movements back when. Now its gone. As far as I can tell it ain't coming back. I keep wanting to feel that sense again and I don't.
The whole business culture is built on systems of thought and organization, that make social consciousness the enemy to be systematically destroyed at every turn. It's not just unions, but any sense of solidarity among people or sense of a social consciousness. These social needs have been replaced with a system of loyalty organization and some individual superior, like companies and belief in the boss, or something like that. About the only system available for developing a sense of collective is the passive audience of mass media, where power says, we talk, you listen... The current message is, you are going subordinate your needs for the greater good. The greater good turns out to be the biggest enemy of all, the neoliberal economy.
I kept thinking the economic crash would bring some of that sense of a shared fate back. Nope. Every man for himself. Sure there are news stories, but they usually portray an accident of circumstance, and the people hit as victims. Who wants to identify with victims? These stories produce a combination of reactions most of which turn out to be, blame the victim through some individual flaw, some version of complicity.
This ceaseless individuation is built into the culture, especially the business culture---which in my case literally turn into a Hobbesian nightmare. I watched maybe ten people get fired or laid off in the last year as business got worse and worse. In my opinion there was nothing wrong with any of them. However, as I talked to others, I heard mostly excuses as to why this or that person had to go. As the new hires filled in the empty cubicals, I stopped bothering to make friends. Me or they were going to be gone soon enough.
I went out drinking a couple times with two of the other techs after I left. After a few to loosen up the spirits, they were mad at me for leaving. I practically choked on my drink laughing. They were giving me the treatment. It was my fault, their work days were now harder. I was too weak to take the load, etc, etc. I broke solidarity, which meant loyalty to a horrible job. Where was that solidarity when I used to talk about a union?
CG