Thanks to those who serve

Here's a couple other emotional responses from vets who served in combat zones.

“My husband is a paraplegic and can’t control 3/4 of his body now. Me, I’ve got PTSD, an anxiety disorder, two messed up knees, depression, a bad back, tinnitus, and chronic insomnia. I wish both had never served.”

“I spent ten years in the military. I worked 15 hour days to make sure my troops were taken care of. In return for my hard work I was rewarded with three military members raping me. I was never promoted to a rank that made a difference. And I have an attempt at suicide. Fuck you!”

“My best childhood friend lost his mind after his time in the marines and now he lives in a closet in his moms house and can barely hold a conversation with anyone. He only smokes weed and drinks cough syrup that he steals since he can’t hold a job.”

“Recently attended the funeral for a west point grad with a 4yr old and a 7yr old daughter because he blew his face off to escape his ptsd but thats nothing new.”

“My best friend from high school was denied his mental health treatment and forced to return to a third tour in Iraq, despite having such deep trauma that he could barely function. He took a handful of sleeping pills and shot himself in the head two weeks before deploying.”

“Well, my father got deployed to Iraq and came back a completely different person. Couldn’t even work the same job he had been working 20 years before that because of his anxiety and PTSD. He had nightmares, got easily violent and has terrible depression. But the army just handed him pills, now he is 100% disabled and is on a shit ton of medication. He has nightmares every night, paces the house barely sleeping, checking every room just to make sure everyone’s safe. He’s had multiple friends commit suicide.”

“I was #USNavy, my husband was #USArmy, he served in Bosnia and Iraq and that nice, shy, funny guy was gone, replaced with a withdrawn, angry man … he committed suicide a few years later…when I’m thanked for my service, I just nod.”

That's not even the reflection of the tiniest part of the tip of the iceberg. But you go on thinking about your swell gratitude for their service once a year in a post on your favorite internet site while simultaneously citing yourself for being a caring human being.

There is an incredible homeless and mental health problem across the warmer parts of this country, a significant percentage of the people living in canvass shelters and rickety tents are veterans, most of them hooked on opioids they started on to control pain, both physical and mental the cause of which is this country's interminable appetite for war.

The last time anybody on the left or the right even made the tiniest effort to protect the people who sign up to protect us, came after Bush deployed our troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, that shit went away of course when Obama was elected as it seems Dems only hate war when it's a sitting Republican president fucking up people's lives. Shame on all of civilian America for the murder we do around this world both to others and our best kids.

Finally, the only solution to this horror is to reinstate the draft. In so doing you remove that well insulated cocoon of safety that protects the best families in America from these horrors. And yeah, yeah, Georgie Bush beat the draft cause he had a rich daddy, but people noticed and started asking themselves, "Wait a minute, if these assholes telling us how we need to fight this war in order to preserve our freedom are dodging their responsibility here, maybe this thing isn't really about what they say it is."

Because it never is.

Agreed