The first thought that occurs to me is that we should immediately withdraw all liberal "girly men" from Iraq and Afghanistan and replace them with "real men" from the winger alternative universe.
They'll show us how to do it. You betcha.
That "Raven" is a real piece of work. As if an entire generation of WWII veterans didn't find solace in the bottle. But maybe his dad getting drunk and kicking the shit out of him was part of not succumbing to "ghosts".
The thing that pisses me off the most about these retarded rightwingers is that they don't know history. They don't read books. All their history is easily supplied by patriotic anecdotes and Fox News analogies. PTSD has been around as long as there has been people fighting each other.
And the Iraq War is somehow less gorier than other wars? Do people die in Mesopotamia with golden sparkles shooting out of them instead of blood? In the age of the internet has he not seen the photos that the US troops post up, let alone the people fighting the occupation and each other?
It's just a shitpile of ignorance that keeps building.
That was fast.
We've already seen the "Stab in the back" theory raise its ugly and completely false head, and now we're seeing the "they're faking shell-shock cuz they're cowards" meme. It's been seen before, it's just moving a lot faster now.
Bring back the draft and ship "Raven" and the rest of these fuckers off to Iraq. Let them see and hear and taste and smell what real battle is like, then see if any of them are unaffected.
Fucking wankers.
Right cause the WWI gerneration idn't devlp the origional term for PSTD or anything.
Raven needs to sign up, show our troops how a real man deals with combat...hope he brings along extra pants.
Fuck these airport-bathroom-stall-crotch-clutchers Hubris. I'm the Chief of Mental Mealth for two Veteran's PTSD programs. We've just started to get our first complement of OIF "survivors". Just wait until this latest shitstorm of "fake" PTSD sufferers starts to rain down on their empty fucking craniums.
come now, you aren't really surprised, are you? after all these right-wingers are STUPID EVIL COWARDS
These idiots confuse '300' with reality, when in fact it's truly suck-ass history.
For one thing, the Athenians, with their command of the Mediterranean, were the ones that stopped the Persian advance westward. For another, no Spartan male ever told his wife that he loved her: That would have been treason, as a Spartan's love and devotion were to be focused solely on the state of Sparta. That's why the family unit was deliberately undermined by Sparta's rulers: The kids were taken from their mothers as soon as they could hold a spear.
In other words, the Spartan state was everything the righties claim to fear yet secretly crave: The hyper-controlling daddy-figure state.
brilliantly said, and brilliantly true...
come now, you aren't really surprised, are you? after all these right-wingers are STUPID EVIL COWARDS
Yes. I know Star Wars is just a space-opera fantasy, but when I imagine the sort of sentients in that story-world who would form the core of support for Palpatine's evil Galactic Empire, I imagine them as being a lot like our very own keyboard commandos.
Just in case anybody thinks I'm blowing off hot-gas, look at the upper-right corner of this execrable Kool-Aid drinker blog. Does that symbol look familiar? It should.
Beautiful writing Mr. Sonic. It is greatly appreciated.
When have fascists not hated the state military and veterans? They put their faith in private armies.
This kind of bullshit predates Vietnam. MacArthur dismissed the Bonus Army as a bunch of non-vet pinko agitators.
You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
"They put their faith in private armies."
*cough Blackwater cough*
Who needs a draft? We just need to call on the sturdy souls of the 101st Chairborne Fighting Keyboarders to volunteer to sign up! Why, they're such tough studmuffins they'll open the Mother Of All Cans Of Whoopass on the hajjis and end the war in a week!
I call on the combat-age able-bodied young men of the Radical Right to run, don't walk, to your nearest recruiter and sign up! Your country and your divinely anointed, infallible Dear Leader need YOU! Whaddaya say?
Anyone? Bueller? BUEL-LER...?
*crickets chirping* 
IBW: figthing wars are for poor people.
Such bullshit. I have an uncle in an asylum - he's been there since he came back from WWII with "shell shock". The people saying that must not have any veterans among their family and friends - more likely, they just ostracize them while saying how much they just lur-r-ve the troops.
So here we are...at the endgame, where the rats, the right-wing, with their ring-tailed asses backed into a spike-filled corner lash out at everything. Lindsey Graham and his co-horts who so chivalrously defended Petraeus from “gasp!” harsh words (Lan' sakes...did someone faint an' drop they's handkerchief?) are now ripping the shit out of the three star general they wouldn't so much as say “boo” about when they were in supa-lie mode about the war. But as soon as he cites its folly, suddenly, he's an incompetent, he's why we were losing (funny...I remember them all saying we were winning, then), he was a failure.
And now, having shot that wad, they're realizing the hell that's coming home in the damaged soldiers from ths war—so, to seed the ground for their defense of when that shit hts the fan, the right is setting up its “Hey it wasn't the war what done it to 'em, it was school lunch, and HeadStart and Jimmy-fucking-Carter who fucked these soldiers brains up!”
The goalposts are moving so Goddamned fast by this crew of weasel-fucks that they've managed to hit folks in the upper deck and stadium parking lot. Remember, these are the people who went on and on about how great and perfect every soldier was, and how nearly every soldier backed Bush's war unquestioningly. Now that these soldiers might show some signs of ill-repair as a result of Bush's folly—signs of ill-repair that might manifest itself here back home, all of a sudden, the vets are weak-minded sissies ”who just couldn't take it out there” because they're lily-livered “liberals” at heart.
Who...“were once soldiers who backed Bush's war unquestioningly.”
That isn't just elliptical logic—it's seven-helixed, Irwin Corey, concussion-blather.
These are idiots who wolfed down every bite of the most superficial elements of “The Greatest Generation”, all the while ignoring the untidy things about those men—after all, they were just men, not Gods—men who were changed by war's sights and sounds and tactile hurt. Men who closed off emotionally, drank too much, and laid hard hands on wives and children as a partial result of the things they experienced. It wasn't a time for “introspection”. Men packed that shit down deep inside and let it boil and reduce down to a thick, potent stew of pain. A pain they would unexpectedly share from time to awful time with their families, and yes...the world.
But the backstabbing cowards and war-groupie skank taking the soldiers to task wouldn't fucking understand that. It's all Sgt. Rock, and Gomer Pyle USMC, Beetle Bailey, and John Wayne's “Green Berets” for them. Fuck what war really means. What seeing, and doing the things, oft-times horrific things that war entails can do to a soldier—a human being.
I wrote this in March about the damaged veterans I used to see near the VA hospital near my childhood home:
“I got better care in the middle of the f*cking jungle than ten minutes from my house” I remember one gaunt, afro-ed outpatient growling to a friend at the counter one day. I briefly dated a girl who lived in Addisleigh, and I noted one day sitting on her porch that we only seemed to see the VA patients coming in and out of the place--never employees, and how I never saw the doctors out on the Boulevard.
“They ain’t crazy.”, the girlfriend pointed out. (talking about the doctors) “They come in and go out the back way, otherwise some of those dudes’d jump ‘em. It’s a rough place, and they hold the doctors responsible. One got f*cked up at the bus stop a few years ago, and ever since then, they go out the back door—and get the bus a few stops back ithe other way.”
I hadn’t thought about that conversation until this (Sunday) morning. What kind of treatment would lead patients to wanna whip a doctor’s *ss? And move not one doctor , but drive ‘em all to use a crappy back door near a loading bay for entry and egresss? I shudder to think of what had so many of those olive-drab clad vagabonds who wandered up and down Linden so incensed about that hospital. Well, at least I used to shudder.
I wrote that about the situation at Walter Reed Army Hospital—dealing with the physical damage so many of these men suffered, and only touching on their mental anguish. But that mental anguish is as we're seeing now, amidist the amputations, and head wounds, and paralysis, just as damaging—if not in many ways more so.
The time-release whirlwind we're gonna reap from this war is gonna be something awful. And it's gonna be folks like Doc Bopper who'll have to deal with the victims of it directly. I do not envy him.
The initial victims, that is. We're gonna have to handle the second wave—us—ourselves. Fools like Malkin and “Raven” want to dog out the front line sufferers.
They do so at their own fucking peril.
And thank you for a great damned post Hubris—thank you for putting it up.
I have an uncle in an asylum - he's been there since he came back from WWII with "shell shock".
Hearing about such things makes me feel so sad. But that's good because that's why we need to hear it. Otherwise more people will develop the callous, war-movie attitude towards combat that these ridiculous keyboard-commandos have.
Rarely comment but read every day. Excellent post. People like "Raven" are beneath contempt. As I posted once on Steve's blog my father and both his brothers were involved in WWII. One infantry, one navy, one Merchant Marine running supplies across the North Atlantic. Uncle Gord, the MM, was in the engine room when a torpedo ripped through. He was injured, returned, drank himself to death, but while doing so managed to irreparably tear apart a marriage, become estranged from his two children, survive three strokes and finally succumb to an embolism. Uncle Alec came back from the Navy in 45. He was 18 when he joined, 23 when he returned. He managed to hold on, although he never talked about his experiences (his ship was scuttled in the south pacific), however, he also drank himself to death. Dad, I remember, used to get up in the morning and pour himself two fingers of scotch before breakfast. He was emotionally distant, verbally abusive when he spoke, and continued with the scotch after work until he passed out. He also drank himself to death. Interestingly, Uncle Gord's son, Gord junior, drank himself into marriage breakdown, homelessness and death a few years back. My story is similar to most of the people I knew in high school, back in the sixties, so anyone, anywhere who says that PTSD is not part of the outcome of ANY war is a fool or part of a deliberate misinformation attempt, or had relatives who were sociopaths. BTW, my Granddad was killed at Paschendale, and my other GrandDad was wounded at Dieppe, survived, and drank himself to death. Hmmm, pattern here?
“Hey it wasn't the war what done it to 'em, it was school lunch, and HeadStart and Jimmy-fucking-Carter who fucked these soldiers brains up!”
You forgot Midnight Basketball (which, if you'll read the Wikipedia stub to which the link goes, you'll see was one of the few worthwhile ideas to come from the administration of Bush the Elder).
The goalposts are moving so Goddamned fast by this crew of weasel-fucks that they've managed to hit folks in the upper deck and stadium parking lot.
"Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Eurasia is our ally. Eurasia has always been our ally."
Men packed that shit down deep inside and let it boil and reduce down to a thick, potent stew of pain. A pain they would unexpectedly share from time to awful time with their families, and yes...the world.
It's probably rather impolite of me to say this, but that does have a thing or two to do with why there are so many royal pieces of work in the ranks of the Baby Boomer generation.
LM, I still remember that anecdote you related about a man who became a member of your family through marriage to your sister (if I remember correctly) who was the guy that everybody loved, but his personality was radically and badly changed by the experience of being in combat. It was one of the most deeply sad things I've ever read here.
I wryly tell people I once earned a degree in clinical psychology. That is: I worked to pay for it. The actual sheepskin is hanging on my first husband's wall.
Sammy was the son of a two-tour Vietnam Marine gunney who ended his career as a Camp Pendleton DI. So he'd spent his childhood doing the non-com tour of the world -- born at Parris Island, played Little League at Cubi Point in the Phillippines, went back home to Grandma's house west of San Juan while Dad went back the second time, and finally graduated as the valedictorian of Oceanside's biggest high school with a full ride to USC.
As the oldest kid in a Latino military family, he stepped up to being the "man of the house" before he was out of the primary grades. He was 10 when his dad came home for good to Pendleton, 80% deaf in one ear and 40% in the other from years around artillery, prone to nightmares and rages and the occasional Saturday trip to the bottom of a rum bottle. Papa was a good man with sixth-grade education; for him, a career in the Corps had been the only escape from a life of serfdom in the sugar cane fields. He knew, going in, that sacrifices would made; but his kids would have it better. And they did. But the sacrifices left their scars; and his oldest son observed those scars closely.
Sam and I split shortly before he graduated. The year after (for reasons I never understood), he took his newly-minted doctorate and signed on with the USAF as a VA Doctor-Captain-Sir counseling PTSD vets -- a field he had some personal experience with, growing up as he did. Most counseling psychologists see 25 or 30 patients a week, often fewer; it's a high-stress job, and you need the time off just to keep your own equilibrium. But they had him seeing 40 patients a week, plus running a couple groups. As a military brat who spoke both English and Spanish without accent; and who was also conversant in both Anglo and Latino attitudes toward masculinity, duty, sacrifice, and honor; he was just in too much demand to be allowed to rest.
His strengths became weakness in the hands of the VA. Four years of that unremitting pace put him off counseling psychology for the rest of his life, which was a loss to the profession. It also radicalized him, making him acutely aware of the ways in which schools track black and brown kids away from success (and, not coincidentally, toward the military). He eventually became one of the country's leading experts (and literally wrote the textbook) on how standardized tests shortchange bilingual and bicultural kids. He's a professor at St. John's in Queens now.
It all turned out OK in the end. But the VA appears to have a knack for chewing up its talented doctors with the same blithe ignorance that it chews up soldiers. And that may explain a lot, too.
L&L:
Yes...that tale of my brother-in law is a sad one. I haven't discussed it much lately because it's not going well. He spent time in Ramadi, and came back a radically, and for-the-worse changed man. My nephew is in the middle of the whole thing—he'll be 4-years-old this month, and the whole situation is simply awful.
The relationship between my brother-in-law and sister is dissolved. But he's still giving his OWN family hell, and they want our (my family's) help in “fixing” him.
He wouldn't go to counseling, or listen to anyone. He became a remote, dead-eyed, shell of his former self. This strapping, gregarious, fun-loving man is someone else altogether. And now he's back over there—somewhere—all fucked up and with a gun in his hand.
I don't know what we'll get back when he comes home ( I pray he does).
And all he has ever let on in the time he was home was that he “saw things in Ramadi that were terrible”. What those things were, I don't know, but he saw 'em, felt 'em, lived 'em...and now he's right back in the sauce again.
But hey...he's just a p*ssy who can't take it, right? According to Malkin and her syphilitis-chewed brained acolytes, that is.
I'd ask for God to have mercy on their souls, except they don't actually have any.
My nephew is in the middle of the whole thing—he'll be 4-years-old this month, and the whole situation is simply awful.
It's because of these Iraq-War vets who will be parenting children that I really worry about the post-millenial generation which is currently mostly in diapers or in the earliest years of elementary school. As if those poor kids won't have enough hell and shit to deal with in declining energy-resources, economic contraction, and global climate-change!
My uncle was a Marine in the Pacific campaign in WWII, was involved in several landings and had to kill several times. Drank heavily, had a lot of problems (while being a very good man). Definite PTSD. And he grew up Back of the Yards, South Side of Chicago, the child of immigrants, not coddled.
The only good thing about all this is that the ass-flashing misbehavior of the Radical Right may finally piss off enough habitual non-voters into actually voting this time that the GOP [which is basically a branch of the Radical Right these days] will suffer a historic meltdown in 2008.
May 2008 become the year the elephant jumps the shark. 
no one in my family has served in a war more recent then hte spanish american war, so I have no first hand experience, but i am scared...post WWII, post korea, post Nam a new breed of PTSD manufactured nuts whent on killing sprees in this country.if we don't do something to help these guys spree and serial murders are going to spike again.
I suppose it's not really about PTSD. If a war whore accepts PTSD they accept war has consequences and have to deal with their complicity in the litany of horror unleashed in Iraq.
My uncle ran a rooming house in a small Iowa town with a VA Hospital. For decades, he had guys staying there who were in for treatment at the VA. He talked about when he first started out he kept the peace with the threat of a baseball bat. When the Viet Nam vets started showing up for treatment of mental illness, the bat was no longer a threat; these guys kept guns in their luggage.
A ex-boyfriend of mine came back from Iraq writing short stories about monsters and dying children. I was never quite sure if he saw himself as protecting children from monsters, or as a monster himself.
HS - I don't know what to say bro, but you know what I mean. I'm lucky, I only had to spend a little time around guys who pissed and shat themselves as they died.
Let's hope chopper pilot can start to come back to life.
And all the other guys.
"Mental Mealth" - Jeezus! That is what happens when you're typing commentary at a bleary-eyed 5:36AM. Nice of you all to ignore the orthographic seizure.
Good article.
Another Boomer here (though I was kind of tail-end of the Baby Boom).
My Dad was in North Africa and Italy in WWII. He never talked about the war, except to joke that he'd been a muleskinner for the Army, which I didn't realize until many years later meant that he'd been at Monte Cassino. He drank himself to death at the ripe old age of 42.
Nope, no nancy-boy PTSD in his generation, nosiree!
My wife's grandfather fought at the Argonne, and got a lungful of mustard gas that crippled him for life (which was probably also shortened by his alcoholism).
And frankly, I can see that wars of occupation like Viet Nam and Iraq could produce more and worse cases of PTSD, adding a nifty frosting of isolation and paranoia to the "normal" horrors explosives and high-velocity metal perpetrate on frail skin-bags full of guts.
That's the fatal flaw in the calculations of these stern Masters of War like Raven: Their plans for subjugation and Empire ultimately depend on human beings, and frail vessels that we are, we're always letting them down.
So I guess it's perfectly understandable if Raven and its ilk occasionally let their disappointment show. They can't help it.
Because when it comes right down to it, they're nothing but a bunch of pathetic, lackluster putzes playing Greatest Generation dress-up.
The fuck he knows about it. My war was, as such things go, "nice". None of my buddies bought it.
And I still have nights I can't sleep, days I want to drink before noon and twitches when someone is silhouetted against the sky on an overpass.
I ponder lines of sight, angles of fire, the best place to set the ambush.
But that's because I'm some sort of pansy? Right, that's why I was able to drive a soft-sided humvee from Kuwait to Tikrit. That's why I was able to spend 12 hour days working the V Corps Interogation Cage, be on the OMT for TacHumint Teams and not lose it when I came down with an auto-immune disorder from my time in the Cradle of Civilisation.
So Raven, you can come and talk to me about my sissy-ways. I'm not sure what sort of mood I want to be in when he does.
Dipshit.
moonglum: No, WW1 just gave us a new name for an old ill. After the Civil War those who weren't quite right were said to have, "Soldier's Heart"
This shit has been with us since the dawn of war.
Hub, I'm sorry, but y'all check out the "Jesus with Kung-fu" thread at the General's.
It's another coffee-sprayer...:o)
http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/
Woops, scroll down, it's:
"The Blessed Virgin enjoys delivering a few votes to the testicles" thread.
Actually, the "Jesus" thread aint half-bad, either. :o)
#%&@@!*!!!
"VOLTS" to the testicles, dammit...
Been a long day....
Freudian slip...? :o)
PTSD is all fake? God I love it tell it to the 4 ex wives and number 5 who still sticks around to see I get my meds and keep my doctor appointments, tell it to my kids who won't let me see my grandkids due to my PTSD I wish it all was fake KMA
What assholes.
I have a little story for those little Cheeto eating cowards:
In the notes of Band of Brothers, there's the name, Robert J. Rader. He of course served in the Ambrose's famous Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division in WWII.
We named a local bridge after him, the Robert J. Rader Memorial Bridge. (He'd been a highly thought of community leader and special ed teacher).
All of the surviving Easy Co. vets came to the ceremony, and talked about their experiences. These heroes who saved the world as teenagers, say they all suffered from depression until Ambrose helped get them talking. You could not find more prototypical* military heroes than these men, and they were all emotionally damaged, and unable to heal for most of their lives.
* - except for the part about being humans, and doing things like starting special ed programs.
I've got nothing to add to this righteous statement of one man's truth. Truth is indeed what it is and if those of us who were lucky enough, or determined enough, not to go to war and return injured in mind and body don't squash the ignorant sacks of cowardly pus now attacking our wounded soldiers like the fukin' bugs they are....
We don't deserve to live.
.
12 generations in the USA all 12 including myself been in one fight or the other. We had more horrors and battles in our living rooms than chickenhawks can dream of or wish for. As a kid I can remember our mail being delivered by a wheezy old fellow coughing his insides out as he climbed our steps. Gas in the trenches was his excuse. He never made it to retirement. MY first boss finally losing his frostbit foot along with his liver and his wife to some forgotten iced hell in Korea Worse of all , dad. Lots of medals, lots of drink and for sure hell upon hell.
We do the fighting and you keep on typing.
raven is in need of some soul searching.... wait a minnit. They have no souls, no sense of self, no connection with humanity at all.
I always think of the movie "Coming Home" so I went looking for a clip, didn't find one, but surprised to find a movie review in Tuesday's NYT
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/...g-Home/
overview
I think this should be re-released in theaters everywhere. I thought that in 2001, too.
No one would ever choose to have PTSD, not ever. I think everyone who comes back has it to one degree or another, now or later.... but its there. I believe it takes more courage and strength to deal with it than to shove it down and never ever learn how to deal with it. Its a tough row for certain, but a worthy endeavor.
It's why we should never ever go to war. The people in denial of the true cost of war, like raven, scare the holy hell out of me. Stupidest beings in the entire universe.
Those with PTSD have true strength and courage.
May 2008 become the year the elephant jumps the shark.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker | 10.15.07 - 12:23 pm
Personally, I'm hoping it's the year the elephant dies a horrible, agonizing death from having its flesh stripped off by piranha.
Why is it that I imagine this Raven character dressing up like George C. Scott every weekend, putting Patton on his DVD player, and cheering when he slaps the soldier in the hospital.
'All their history is easily supplied by patriotic anecdotes and Fox News analogies.'
Wegler- Absolutely. It's as if they've never heard mention of the 'lost generation' that was wrecked by WWI.
Too many comments, I doubt anyone will read this by now.
but really. My grandfather fought in WW2, on the "wrong" side, and was traumatized before PTSD was public. My other grandfather was divebombed by a fighter plane, lost his fingers, had all but one sewed on, and ... well, never talked about it, either. The real horrors of war are never understood until you've fought it. And been there. And the look on both their eyes, with the "then the bullets" moment, I can't begin to say anything. The violence fetishiests, Malkin Limbaugh Reynolds et al, fuck them. War avoiders, all of them. Fuck them. They never cared about the troops (all you R's who think they did? who think Bush did? you're ignoramouses who deserve what you got from the fucking idiots you voted for) and they never wanted to care about them. For those with PTSD, you have all my sympathy. I'm in the third generation of children of PTSD, and it stil matters, we are still living the effects.
My grandfathers who both fought in WWII didnt have PTSD. Nah, they just came home and lived shorted, anxiety filled lives.
My dad's father was an infantry officer who fought in North Africa and the South Pacific, attacking fortified ridges in New Guinea that are like knives. One wrong step and you fall away into oblivion. Try dragging artillery up that under fire. They still find bodies and grenades up there.
He never spoke about the war, but I always remember him as anxious, and with a stomach ulcer. He eventually died of a heart attack. My dad (also a soldier) said it was the war that killed him, 25 years later. Of course, this wasnt PTSD, was it?
My grandfathers who both fought in WWII didnt have PTSD. Nah, they just came home and lived shorted, anxiety filled lives.
My dad's father fought in North Africa and the South Pacific, attacking fortified ridges in New Guinea that are like knives. One wrong step and you fall away into oblivion. Try dragging artillery up that under fire. They still find bodies and grenades up there.
He never spoke about the war, but I always remember him as anxious, and with a stomach ulcer. My dad said it was the war that killed him, 25 years later. Of course, this wasnt PTSD, was it?
Man, I am on staff running a very large homeless shelter for Veterans. PTSD isn't real?
BWAHAHAHA!
Someone(s) have been staring at their navels instead of watching around them. I know personally people who their experience "broke," who have imaginary friends, and talk to them out in public. Others who have such anger-management issues, you do not press them when they get angry, or else!
I have it myself, diagnosed by a Clinician skilled in Veteran's issues. Let's see...
Isolating one's self.
Highly developed sense of personal space.
Sudden attacks of rage.
Few "close" friends; wary of others.
Insomnia.
Loath crowds.
Don't like people touching me.
Put on a "false face" to be able to deal with the public, otherwise very, very introspective.
Drinking and drug issues.
Nightmares; waking suddenly out of a deep sleep, panicked.
Whoever says PTSD doesn't exist has been sucking at the great Liberal Gas Pipe.
Oh, HT:
Same-o, Same-o, Man. My Dad, and two uncles were all WWII combat Vets (Dad also Korea). They all drank themselves to death. Older brother, Vietnam: a real drinker. Me, Grenada (with above mentioned issues).
Yeah, I think there's something to it.
Isolating one's self.
Highly developed sense of personal space.
Sudden attacks of rage.
Few "close" friends; wary of others.
Insomnia.
Loath crowds.
Don't like people touching me.
Put on a "false face" to be able to deal with the public, otherwise very, very introspective.
Drinking and drug issues.
Nightmares; waking suddenly out of a deep sleep, panicked.
and thats just this afternoon!
Thanks to everyone for their comments and stories. I know for every one person that wrote there are many to could not. We have to keep fighting these fools. Its what we do. Thanks for all your support.
Beautifully written. I'd say that you should ignore the 101st Chairborne, but they spread their ignorance and that must be fought. Hubris Sonic and all you other traumatized vets, I wish you the best. I thank god that my dad spent the waning days of WWII 20,000 feet above the fray, long after the Luftwaffe had been destroyed, and the Bombs got dropped before he made it to the Pacific.
My god. That list, in every detail, was my dad.
He was a Korea-era vet, but he never saw combat. He spent those years in Nome, Alaska, watching the Russians across the Bering Strait.
But something, somewhere, triggered PTSD in him. I think that need for isolation played a huge role in where and how he chose to live.
People who've survived child abuse or rape also find themselves living on this list.
It's not just veterans -- but when we got serious about treating the Vietnam vets for PTSD, what we learned took us a long way toward treating other psychological trauma victims as well.
And there's a lot more to be learned, and done. If we start listening to what these guys have to tell us, the whole world will crack wide open.
There's always been a term for 'the damage done'. In the US Civil War, it was known as Soldier's Heart. So oddly and tragically poetic a description.
This incredible post reminded me of a poem by a mentor and friend : Capt. Steve Mason-The Wall Within
http://home.earthlink.net/~dougy...men/
masong.html
I'm told that my comments contain too many lines breaks and......"will not be added".....
Check out Steve Mason's(VietNam veteran's poet laureate) "The Wall Within".....
For that matter ...check out everything that Steve wrote......
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