My opinion of the military is still shaped by the recent knowledge that more soldiers commit suicide than they die in action.
That means that we're not even keeping them to 'die for us', which would at least have a sense of honor.
Instead, we are submitting them to horrible, devastating psychological trauma that accompanies them for the rest of their lives and manifests itself in duty through either a loss of the will to live, or many times through antisocial behavior. All so that we can pretend America's military superiority still makes it #1

I really want to respond to you, but I'm too tired to really articulate what I want to say. I'll get back to it later, after I sleep.

WTF are you talking about, the constitution is constantly being threatened by those bastards in the east, hell if they had it our way they would go around killing any American they think threatens their ability to suppress their people.You know who I'm talking about those blasted politicians in Washington D.C. We gotta stop the new NDAA with it's ability to bypass due process

Yeah, we white people have to kill brown people to save them from themselves!

Except if they give us oil, like the Saudis do, then we're BFF.

Who said anything about brown people. I'm talking about the guys out east. It's all right there in my post

Society sees war as this great, noble, altruistic, patriotic thing. It's not true. Things are twisted to be that way. We impart these qualities to our veterans when we tell each other that they fight for our freedoms. While they may believe they do in the start, that never holds up after they face the reality of fighting. They realize that none of those qualities which are presented in our stories of heroism and valor are actually present. The ones that survive either don't talk about it and try to forget, or they speak out about their experience and try to expose why it's all so wrong; you can find their accounts if you look, but for some reason we don't connect their experiences to a sensory world and it's largely ignored.

Memorial day angers me because it's not about an abstract for me; It's about people who really died. They died useless deaths, and my country doesn't even have the honesty and integrity to remember it correctly. They're remembered as living like something they weren't and dieing in a way that they didn't. Their memories are used and exploited to make the nation appear as good and just victims whose people were taken by an evil and subhuman enemy. They're used to spur yet more people to war and to justify and make all the things that we do afterword right.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...sh/wth2tt8.gif

:P oh well, highlight my first post, including the black space. I've admittedly been going a bit crazier lately.

I think Jay needs to make some clarifications.

Was he an Army Medic in the Vietnam war?

If so, then yeah. It's accurate about what he's saying as far as medics go.

Then again, I went to hospital corps school in the Navy.

They told me the same thing. The medic was the number 1 target in combat. *shrugs*

V when you talk about war you sound exactly like my father, to the point where I hear his voice when reading some of these posts, funny how that works. I'll never understand when people say you can't equate what is happening now to Vietnam, the technology may be very different and there is no draft but the psychology of soldiers then and now are so clearly similar.

AshleyO, JJ is a woman. In Vietnam. the army still had the women's army corps, not combat medics or corpman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Army_Corps

I understand what they told you, but women weren't even near anything to close combat. If it they were, it's still a bogus fucking thing to say. Do you know what they told me? "A scout's average life expectancy after being exposed to enemy observation is 3 seconds." It's like "What? Where the fuck do you get that, and why is it relevant?"

Sol, your comment kind of bothers me.

Err. Not that it's offensive. I mean that I feel uncomfortable knowing that. I don't know anything about your father other then that, but it still bothers me.

He was pretty laid back and kind of quiet, talking about war, which he rarely did, was one of the few things that he got really worked up about. Other than this one thing I really don't think you two have much of any similarities.

Well that certainly changes things. I had assumed Jay was a man. I tend to forget that about her. I had thought that she was a combat medic because that's how I imagined Vietnam medics. You know, like how the Marines have medics.

Well, I mean the army had them like the marines do, but women were not (and still are not) allowed to fill that role.

I can understand that. Ask Saya, she's really hesitant to ask me about work because I have a tendency to rant and rave. I'm sure Kontan is the same way.

Though, I don't think it would be unfair to say that I get worked up about a lot of things.

I didn't rant and rave as much. I didn't like being in the service, but comparing my experience to that of a soldier's is pretty unfair.

I think the worst thing for my experience was that it seemed like they were constantly trying to make things inconvenient because the mission in Italy was just a waste of time. So they went out of their way to be ridiculous.

I think the biggest blow to my department was when we actually DID get a terrorist threat. It was supposed to be us that stood against that. But instead, they mobilized the marines to do the security for us which made a lot of us MAs wondering just what the hell we were doing there if we weren't even allowed to do our jobs when it actually mattered. That and of course the constant guilt of turning my back on the hospital corps when it quickly dawned on me that I couldn't in my right mind handle what Versus goes through.

That is pretty much the same on my end as a an MA as well.

You do but at the same time the way you react to other things that bother you is a bit different, though I can't quite put my finger on exactly what is different about it

I don't think it's that far off. I don't know what the navy is like, but I think that my side of army culture is bad enough. I don't really have a problem speaking about it in general terms, but it feels like everything comes to the surface at once when I start to talk about my personal experience. I have a lot of anger and resentment that has nothing to do with my deployments. I want to share, but I'm really just not comfortable with it sometimes. I guess the simplest way is that I feel like the army is an abusive relationship that I never had; the only thing that I want to do is make it proud, but nothing is ever good enough and I keep getting punished for it. I know that I should leave, but I love it in a really fucked and twisted way.

OH. Okay, then yeah. That NEVER fucking changed. I never could get to the point where I felt like I was one of them.

A little different for me. I was very much accepted after my first tour. After I learned how to fit in, I stopped feeling like an outsider.