Fighting Machines...

The USA government takes young men who volunteer to protect their
home lands and makes them killing machines. We have been doing this
for hundreds of years.

Look at the movie Patriot, the father who did not want his son to go, yet the
young man felt it was the manly thing to do… just what men do..protect.

World War I brought us the same.

The 40’s brought us into World War II, where again, young men went off
to war and women were the support system.. be it nurses or offices workers.
Vietnam brought more young men to the training, because their fathers, uncles
either lost their lives in WWII or were vets who talked about the war. And it was the main thing to do. Even though there were a lot of protesters against the draft.

The thing that made a lot of this hard was… these wars were 20 years apart or
more. When young men were raised in a family situation.. and not to be doing
harm to anyone. Each time they were taken into service.. as a matter of duty and
the draft said it to be true.. you will be trained to fight. During non war times,
these turn out to be war games.. games.. practice, no dead bodies, no blown up
ships… And when war really did come, they were shipped out fast and furious.
Dying, being replaced just as fast and furious. Those young men came home over the years, as damaged souls. Especially when we got to the point that we tried to make sure our boys weren’t bullies in civilian life. Mine own were taught to never start a fight, but finish it if someone else started it.

Now we have volunteer troops, all of them, decided on their own to go down and
see the recruiter. Be it they were at rallys at school or seeing a soldier at the high
school, and it looked cool to be in a uniform.. Which they found out that real life
it wasn’t quite so cool.. or maybe they paid dearly to be looking cool, to their friends and family while home on leave. Some of them… a great deal of the reserves went In to get extra money to support themselves and families. We weren’t at war at the time they joined. And after we went to war, it was almost impossible to get out. While signing up for the reserves years ago, and some going to desert storm, it was a short term to be overseas.. this war brought those reservist to full time serving overseas. No more practice on weekends and 2 weeks a year.. this was real war. Buddies being killed in front of you. Your Humvee being blown to bits and if you were lucky you (?) got to fight again another day. And when they came home… when they came home…
Well, home wasn’t quite like they thought. Home was trivial stuff, the people don’t
understand. The good news is no one spits on them, and yells baby killers …like the Nam guys had in the 1970’s. But still, it isn’t the same, life at home.. nothing is the same. They aren’t the same. And it is hard for them to fit in.
So does the government do anything for them? Not much. Unless their fellow service man has been over there and saw what happen, the therapist here doesn’t have a clue. Regular therapy doesn’t work here. Besides, some come back, the Reservist , and try to get back to their old life, old job and etc. Rarely is the job still there, because he has been gone for a year or two. So it is look for a new job in a bad economy. And after months or a year of trying to find a job, he finally gets hired… only 3 months later, he gets word that he has to go back over again. Destroying everything he tries to make life normal… what ever that is…

And we wonder..why things go wrong. So desperately wrong as in Sgt. Bales. Why did they send him back? Surely there was other jobs in the service he could have done. After all he had brain damage from before. Yes, they said he was in good enough shape to go back to the service to serve. Why not be a trainer.. why send him back? Not once, not twice, but 3 times.

Is that an excuse to kill small children? Babies? Women? NO, should he be punished Yes.
But to what extent? That is the question I can’t answer. I wasn’t there. I don’t know all the facts. I haven’t walked in Sgt. Bales’s boots. I would imagine by now he has felt the full extent of the damage he has done. To the poor people he killed. To his family, will his children learn to hold their heads high later? Or will they have to change their names? Or be thought of “those kids, whose father went off the deep end and killed babies”?
And if there comes a day, when Sgt. Bale’s gets to go home… if he does .. will he trust himself to be near his children. Or will the nightmare of that night, come back to take his mind again and do bodily harm to those he loves. We have had that already here in the states. Wives beating, I don’t know about their children.. Some have killed their spouses and themselves. Those who are tortured killing machine souls…

Why doesn’t the government have at least a 6 month stay at a base, with visitation rights to their families on the base to desensitize them? To reverse brain wash them? There has to be an answer. And there has to be an answer to how many times we send the same men and women back there.. and how much time between returns. Don’t have enough troops?
Guess we will have to find a way to solve that problem as well.

I don’t have the answers, but sweeping it under the rug, until the next time.. isn’t the answer.