Vets For Freedom

"The Rand Corporation study recently concluded that one in five troops with service in Iraq or Afghanistan reveal symptoms of major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Veterans by the score have returned to civilian life broken, guilt-ridden, disorientated, and socially marginalized. Over 400,000 of returning vets are in a VA queue waiting to be treated by a dwindling number of psychiatrists. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, are unable to reconcile their former selves with the warped and troubled young men they have become due to their battle experience. These are the men who, in irrepressible fits of rage, shoot their wives, abuse their children, hit the bottle, sleep in cardboard boxes under bridges, and often wind up taking their own lives.

You can't be brought up on American pie, David Letterman and Jay Leno, the moral dictates of baseball, football, locker-room jollity and conventional domesticity and calmly assimilate the ravages to which servicemen are regularly exposed in the Middle East. It is like Jekyll, no longer seeing his own face reflected in the mirror, shuddering at the bestiality of Hyde staring back at him.

The corruption of hundreds of thousands of American youths, exposed to the daily strain of wanton murder and mayhem, cannot return to their mundane hometowns and simply flush away the atrocities they have witnessed or committed. The turbulent effect of this moral dichotomy seeps into every part of American life. It changes attitudes to sickness, death, families, and friendship. It breeds young men and women who come to believe that life is not priceless and full of promise, but treacherous and full of landmines. It cheapens the very notion of goodness and permits cynicism to destroy hope. It shakes people's faith in God and whittles away any sense of empathy they might have had before their spirits were shattered by warfare. It silently argues that life is cheap, torture commonplace, and murder mundane.

A few weeks back at a hearing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a number of Iraq Vets Against The War were offered an opportunity to describe the atrocities they had witnessed and participated in; young men whose lives were radically changed by the bloody-minded immorality of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld punishment of duty in Iraq. It was a riveting piece of C-SPAN coverage more frightening than a horror film and, at the same time, more uplifting than the Sermon on the Mount. The testimonials of these returning-vets described how military superiors ordered them to distort facts about the annihilation of innocent Iraqi citizens, how a warped sense of "brotherhood" enabled cold-blooded murder to be tucked away in false military reports so that no one back home would shudder at the wanton murder of civilians, women, children, and the elderly. They described the freedom from prosecution that non-commissioned officers and officers provided to protect them against indictment or disgrace; the conscious cultivation of rationalizations which sanctified the murder of non-combatants and the willful destruction of private property. In almost every case, the veterans testifying before the caucus declared that more innocent civilians were wantonly killed by US troops than Americans felled by insurgents.

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/cmarow109.html

Here's one vet that says, get the hell out.

Another vet here saying we shouldn't be in Iraq.

Not old enough to be one, but I hang with a lot of Vietnam Vets.

You are batting zip with all of them as well, cj.

I am a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and I say we should be in both places till the job is done.

Edgar, engineer, are either of you Iraq or Afghanistan vets?

Mysteryman

There are other war vets who respectfully repudiate your above views.

Down below is a nine page story for your perusal.

"In an exclusive new index, Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security surveyed more than 3,400 active and retired officers at the highest levels of command about the state of the U.S. military. They see a force stretched dangerously thin and a country ill-prepared for the next fight"

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4198

Here is one more vet 's view

"
BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we "win" and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan.

For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Did we "win" by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people - mostly civilians - died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Did we "win" in Vietnam? We were forced to withdraw, but only after 2 million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.

Did we win in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, with only a few hundred US casualties, but perhaps 100,000 Iraqis died. And the consequences were deadly for the United States: Saddam was still in power, which led the United States to enforce economic sanctions. That move led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to UN officials, and set the stage for another war.

In Afghanistan, the United States declared "victory" over the Taliban. Now the Taliban is back, and attacks are increasing. The recent US military death count in Afghanistan exceeds that in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce "victory"? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?

The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.

Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a "war on terror."

Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.

Yes, Al Qaeda - a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics - was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. "We had to do something," you heard people say.

Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 - exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.

Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: "He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner." The doctor attending him said: "The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?"

We should be asking the presidential candidates: Is our war in Afghanistan ending terrorism, or provoking it? And is not war itself terrorism?

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_27652.shtml

That was no WWII vet. They're all at least 83 years old - they don't speak or write in those inflections.

The greatest generation, what's left of them, most definitely support the war in Iraq, by far.

shooter, please give just a ittybitty touch of documentation, cuz I'm thinkin' of tossin the bullshit flag...

None required. Read the wiggle words and talking points in the article. Nobody 20 years old in the early 1040's wrote that.

My grandparents, aged 94 and 89, are strongly against Bush and the Iraq war. And they report most in their small Texas town feel the same.

Cyclopichorn

That's what I mean.

My Gram HATES Bush, and Grampa was a proud vet...

Discharge status?

Excuse Me?

Prick. What was your discharge status?

Ah, right

Cycloptichorn

Obviously, your (lack of) reasoning precedes you. Genetics are a real bitch.

If you are adressing me shooter, please do so specifically, so I don't "accidently" explode you...

Thanks,

:wink:

I have no idea what you are talking about nor do I care.

Repeat it enough times, you might believe it.

Yep, I have faith you will...

:wink: