WHAT ARE WE DOING?

It seems as the days roll by, more and more young men and women are coming home from their tours of duty cheated and crippled. Cheated of a limb or maybe more, cheated of their youth, and cheated of their ability to care for themselves.

I go into a supermarket and I see a young man with an artificial limb, and the anger builds in me, I know how he got it. I know too that the issue doesn’t end with the prosthetic, there is the financial burdens some of these guys have, maybe even a broken marriage due to his time away.

Then I read about the suicide rates that are increasing in the military branches due to combat, the stress of killing and having to kill or dying. Again maybe the financial burden is over-whelming, and the stress on marriages that these men and women encountered.

I hear the screaming about the fact that the Republicans at their convention didn’t mention the war in Afghanistan, and yet neither party has addressed the issues of military suicides! Both parties are not immune to this. They just stink in different ways.

I look on the social networks and I see people post pictures of the weaponry that we employ, and I wonder: why? Isn’t it the jingoism that got us to Afghanistan in the first place? What does the weapon stand for? It stands for the instruments of destruction, the very thing that makes our men and women cripples physically and emotionally, it stands for the bravado of those who won’t go into battle and experience the horrors of war and the fear it will generate in the core of your being.

We send these men and women into “harms way” and ask them to do these horrific things that will result in their being maimed or killed, or worst still, the children that will come across the battles that are fought over their heads being maimed or killed, then they come home, we release them and they wind up without support. You would think the President would speak up, it is his duty to protect the citizens of this country, why doesn’t he? I don’t want to hear about partisan bickering or it is the Republicans fault, it is the President’s fault he isn’t speaking out. And where in either platform is there mention of this? Where do we find the wounded veterans without support lobby? There is none. Maybe there aren’t enough to get excited about, or care about or even think about?

Where IS our debt to these veterans? Where is the obligation to these brave men and women? We need to start to put some pressure out there. I know we will all forget this and turn the page, and so too will the veterans, because they need to find ways on their own to survive.

I am ashamed of this country that they let these guys down, we asked them to suffer as much as possible and then we forget them: their suffering what for: for some ungrateful rag heads, goat loving stinkers who hate us anyway?

And the suicides, well many kill themselves, because they probably know what they will get when they return, they will get forgotten. We are losing these men more to suicides than to enemy actions, and we are helping the enemy kill them!