Tag Archives: combat

US forces push women to front lines, canon fodder being traditional minority role

Leave a reply

Pentagon lifts ban on women in combat. I guess US prisons have consumed the traditional canon fodder labor pool. What’s the upside to this news –a kinder gentler militarized empire? Fail. Our culture of violence doesn’t breed matriarchs. American women on the front lines is good news for insurgents in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc, etc, now Mali, who must welcome the chance to even the score, US forces having targeted so many of their women. And this retaliatory killing comes with no karmic debt, unlike our civilian casualties, because US female soldiers, like gay don’t-ask-don’t-tell turnstile jumpers, are gung-ho eager-for-carnage volunteers. Have at it ladies. Insurgents must be really encouraged by recruiting trends in US schools which promise the prospect of the US soon deploying kids. We owe our colonial victims so many children’s lives.

Just how doped up on medications are US soldiers now getting?

2 Replies

Pills, pills, pills! Just how doped up on medications are US soldiers now getting? The Los Angeles Times today has an article called A fog of drugs and war that mentions ‘more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S. Army surgeon general.’

….(and that) ‘Nearly 8% of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6% is on antidepressants — an eightfold increase since 2005.’ In the not so distant past, no soldier was allowed to go into combat while on any of these types of drugs. Today is quite different though.

The report continues and states that …

‘Follow-up appointments in the battlefield are often few and far between. Soldiers are sent out on deployment typically with 180 days’ worth of medications, allowing them to trade with friends or grab an entire fistful of pills at the end of an anxious day. And soldiers with injuries can easily become dependent on narcotic painkillers.

“The big difference is these are people who have access to loaded weapons, or have responsibility for protecting other individuals who are in harm’s way,” said Grace Jackson, a former Navy staff psychiatrist who resigned her commission in 2002, in part out of concerns that military psychiatrists even then were handing out too many pills.’

What a mess the ruling elites’ constant war making makes of soldiers. And many of these soldiers were not of the most stable material to begin with. Perhaps it’s simply time to reevaluate whether we should be engaging in all this war for the 1%? Perhaps…. you think?