It was a crass thing for Trump to say to a recent war widow, but of course it's also fundamentally said in praise of brave men. They knew what they signed up for. But do American soldiers know what they sign up for? Not just the risk, but the horror and culpability? Did Trump voters know what they signed up for? I'll put it to you they did not.
Tag: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Wilfred Owen: Spring Offensive & PTSD
You won’t find a more haunting depiction of battle induced PTSD than the last two stanzas of Wilfred Owen’s Spring Offensive. You’ll be curious no doubt to double back on the setup: troops being marched to the frontline, the idyllic lull before battle, the unceremonious charge, and the moment a stealthy sprint turns to mayhem. The next stanza speculates about the fate of those who fall in battle: to bullets, to explosive shells, and to shrapnel. The last stanza is about the "too swift" survivors who "out-fiend" death to come through, and don't want to, or can't, talk about it. 47158
The conceivability that climate change, torture, or Pope’s Catholicism isn’t.
The January 2015 Smithsonian Magazine asks "Did Civil War vets suffer from PTSD?" which seems a progressive conceit from an arbitor of the accepted version of events. I think it's useful to ask "Does a bear shit in the woods?" by which I mean, is it conceivable to you that bears don't shit in the woods? Because your incredulity is critical. Apparently these days, history is written not by historians but by pollsters. Today the commonplace perception of history and science prevails as the dominant verdict. Whether Climate Change is real, or whether torture is torture, depends on how the public polls. Presumably truth being what we want it to be would poll favorably too. 41614
One man’s war hero is another’s snitch. Iraqi informant Jasim Mohammed Ramadon is also an American rapist.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.-- Haha. Iraqi "war hero" Jasim Mohammed "Steve-O" Ramadon was granted asylum in the US after snitching on his countrymen, his tribe, and own father, as a youth informer for the US Army. An American soldier brought Ramadon back to Ft. Carson and praised him as a war hero in his memoir. Now Ramadan has been getting himself into trouble for drunk driving and beating women. Recently, he and four other Iraqi expats were arrested for the violent sexual assault of a neighbor, probably the everyday rape M.O. of American soldiers in occupied lands. I'm laughing because while Ramadon betrayed his dad, beat his girlfriend, and now faces charges of rape, local teabag Red White & Blue guy Jim Cross stepped forward as character witness for Ramadon, saying "his heart is in the right place." Does being a conservative jingoist mean you have to hit every sour note? I was reminded of Cross today because our City Hall fracking protest was interrupted by the stereotypical blimp-neck sticking his smartphone in our faces with lame gotcha questions, beginning with the usual insincere "So what's this about?" Today's idiot was no brighter than Cross, and thought he'd caught
Who really has PTSD?
“Suleiman’s post-traumatic stress disorder left him unable to work and without means to support himself,” says Crosby. “His lack of self-sufficiency has led to further depression and feelings of inadequacy and shame, because he has to rely on his family for his basic needs.” 35145
The Air Force Rape Academy- are the two sexes having trouble getting along in the military?
Let's face it, having young men and women join together in an authoritarian environment like the military most certainly is, is definitely a sure fire recipe for disaster. And disaster is exactly what's happening out at the Lackland Air Force base in Texas. Lackland Air Force Base Sex Scandal: Investigation Has Found 31 Victims So Far. 'Lackland is where every American airman reports for basic training – about 35,000 a year. About one in five are female, pushed through eight weeks of basic training by a flight of instructors that are about 90 percent male.' --And the situation is no better with the other branches of the military either. The military is a poor place for young people to end up in TOGETHER with their mutual problems of finding sexual intimacy in their 20s. Egads! What a mess militarism and faux feminism and machismo make when all mixed together. PTSD anybody?
WWII vet, age 92, finally diagnosed with PTSD why, because we care?
Sgt. Stanley Friedman, a 92 yr-old veteran of the WWII North African campaign, was finally diagnosed with PTSD. Pro bono lawyers couldn't even verify his service records, but after sixty years of denying his claims, the VA has at last been forced to grant Friedman compensation. Is this really the result of crafty legal work, at long last, or of a PR climate now overrun by Big Pharma, whose PTSD drug market windfall needed a poster boy for the baby boomer set, the type of veteran Americans favor over those from less "good" wars?
Pentagon-loving corporate media says to pay no attention to real details about the Sgt. Bales led USA war crime
The news report yesterday, hidden away for the most part, was that Child witnesses to Afghan massacre say Robert Bales was not alone and read that the Afghan reporter who was reporting for the Australian press had also reported being impeded by the US military in her access to the war crime witnesses who were children. Here is what the child witnesses to the slaughter by Bales and his squad said to her... 32205
Why are returning US soldiers with behavior and/or psych problems being pumped so full with narcotics?
According to the study, vets with psychiatric and other behavior problems are being given 2-4 times the amount of narcotics if they claim to have physical pain of some sort as those without these Psych conditions. What gives? PTSD veterans prone to drug addiction get risky painkillers
To cure P.T.S.D. we need to spread it
I always thought it misguided that the antiwar community should worry about our soldiers' PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: it's a guilty conscience soldier, you've earned it. Of course, Troop Supporters bear responsibility too, so we need to spread the guilt around.
A face to launch a thousand protests. Leak your trophy footage you cowards
This is a still from John Pilger's THE WAR YOU DON'T SEE, recently blocked from its US debut in Santa Fe. Why? Because such images will stop war. In particular this shows a terrified Iraqi girl held at gunpoint as her home is searched. I wonder how many such scenes have been captured by embed cameras or GI cellphones. Western eyes are being inoculated to violence and gore, our victims dehumanized, foreign civilians reduced to collateral, but it appears our media managers worry Americans cannot yet resist the ordinary tears of children. Imagine such scenes of heartbreak gone viral across the web. Never mind atrocity or war crime, show us emotional responses with which we can identify. The mass of digital records could doubtless overwhelm Wikileaks. These are not top secret, yet nearly any have been leaked. My appeal to the cowardly US soldier, or the damnable media embed, leak the footage which haunts you already, your PTSD may be the contagion to end public support for our state sponsored terrorism.
News sources, MSM and the mouths of horses…
See, we constantly get told, on this site and any other site that opposes the wars and the occupations and such, that we're listening to the "Liberal Mainstream Media". Huh? The most frequently criticized "Liberal" media are as rabid a War-mongering Mob as Fox, they're just more polite about it. Sometimes more polite about it. The bullshit with the "Ground Zero Mosque" is being whipped up by the MSM CORPORATE whores just as much as the FOX corporate whores. With an insidious difference, they'll use weasel words rather than coming right out and saying "Hate Muslims! Hate Islam! The REAL 'Obsession' is our Hatred for all things Middle East!" like FOX does. Same with the Wounded Warrior bullshit the Pentagon tries to fill a swimming pool with, and then dump us in. The fault of causing all those wounds and deaths isn't in the Anti-War movement, it's in those who twist their own words to make it appear just, and righteous, to CONTINUE the wars and start others. Why would they do that? Money. 19488
An anti-recruitment message especially for military families…
Because whenever the subject of recruitment comes up around certain members of my own family, many of whom were active duty military, the mantra of "But the Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines support the troops' FAMILIES." So, quiz time... Every base has a Base Veterinarian and one of the divisions of that office is Exterminator. You know that the exterminators will inspect your homes for roaches, mice, rats, correct? And will from time to time make a special announcement about having your housing unit ready for the Bug Spray Squad. 18622
GI quadruple amputee’s hobby: guns. Army needs a prosthetic for PTSD.
Wounded Army Specialist Brendan Marrocco was this weekend's NYT front page testimonial to the resilience of US soldiers. The VA is finally acknowledging amputee-counts apparently, so we now learn that 988 veterans have lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specialist Marrocco lost all four, but is learning to get around. He can walk for stints of up to 15-minutes, and his favorite pastime? Shooting guns.
Traumatic Brain Injuries and Statistical Manipulation
This has a two part trigger, for me, I saw a bus stop sign saying that 1 in 5 returning soldiers have TBI and a BBC headline about "stocks fall on manufacturing data", the last being a poorly constructed sentence that can be read two ways, manufacturing as a noun or as a verb transformed to adjective. Either way it would be accurate, recent events on Wall Street show they've been manufacturing the data for a long long time. But with the TBI example, we get some really complex thought-lines from the one sentence. Is that perhaps 20% of ALL returning military personnel? Even with that 20% being limited to Combat Infantry personnel that would be a shocker. And you KNOW the Army would make it minimal. They've been treating (and getting busted doing it) TBI as "underlying personality disorders with onset prior to service" which means the Pentagoons are Covering Their Collective Poopy Butt. 18332
Babykilling new Sport-du-jour. Update: No fatalities, lots of injuries…
Actually in French it would be jeu du jour which is kind of a really bad pun. But, in China, a day care center/preschool was the scene of a knife attack. I didn't read past the headline, sue me. 28 people stabbed, no word in the headline how many died, no word how many were kids. The motive isn't given either, but if it were, it would sound like gnarblsgnashsnarlwhipframdoodle. In short, it wouldn't make any sense to an actual sentient person anyway. I know the standard arguments this will arouse, I bet if I turned on Bile O'Liely or whatever twit is holding forth on Hate-TV and Hate-Radio right now I'd hear "See, if one of the kids had a gun it would never have happened" News Flash, China has Universal Conscription, meaning everybody in the whole damned country learns how to use guns at one point in his life. They also make quite a few guns, so many in fact that they sell them on the export market. Those SkS machine guns that are ever so popular up on Rampart Range, for instance. 16347
These days we outsource our POW-MIA
According to Nation Magazine, there are 131,000 homeless vets, and about 18 suicides per day among America's 25 million vets.
Major Abu Nidal Hasan to meet Jack Ruby
So who was the Fort Hood shooter, do we know? The media's got the back story all lined up for it to be Nidal Malik Hasan, he has three names like all assassins (and sound bites), and now the Army is trotting out witnesses to point their fingers at the Muslim Major. Addressing reports of multiple gunmen, the Army says "there was only one shooter." Although five of the victims may have fallen to friendly fire. So there was a "friendly shooter?" Which one was Hasan? 11167
Army offers Mental Resiliency Training to harden the conscience against PTSD
What do you make of the VA study indicating that more stateside military drone operators suffer higher Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than soldiers in actual combat? It may point to the obvious, that PTSD comes less from being shell-shocked under fire and more from committing deeds to haunt the conscience. If our troops weren't being asked to act inhumanely, perhaps we'd see fewer suicides, or homeless and maladapted vets. Instead the Army has announced it will give all its soldiers "mental resiliency training." This might inoculate their fear of coming home to face their loved ones, but will it steel them against redemption?
Support Our Homeless Troops
COLORADO SPRINGS- I watched yesterday as a group of homeless men disbanded beneath an underpass. I remarked how their yet unbent frames and close-shaved heads made them appear more menacing than usual. Then I noticed one had a graphite prosthetic calf, and I thought about our vets who disappear themselves into being vagabonds. Homelessness is elective you could say, like despondency or suicide. If one in four of America's homeless are veterans, why not tell us what that fraction amounts to? They must know. 3238
Why rent-a-cop if you can rent-a-killer?
The city clerk has been working on a proposal to the Colorado Springs City Council to authorize private security firms to carry semi-automatic weapons. The New Life Church shootings raise the issue, apparently, that security personnel should be better armed, although there were no private security firms present. The mayhem was averted by volunteer church members assigned to security, who made do with a handgun. 2270
Your dad is going to die of cancer
It's just been reported that the children of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to suffer child abuse. Is this finding not terrible enough for their parents to take heed and refuse to to be ordered there? All soldiers going to Iraq and Afghanistan doom themselves to exposure to Depleted Uranium. Does it give anyone pause that they are dooming themselves and their families to certain ill-health? They're not making a selfless sacrifice, they're sacrificing their kids. 1526
Memorial Day 3,500 x 100
This Memorial Day the number of US soldier casualties in Iraq nears 3,500. At 1,000 we held a vigil in Acacia Park. We did the same at the 1,500 and 2,000 marks. The numbered-cross memorial we mounted at Camp Casey COS commemorated near 2,000 deaths. The "Eyes Wide Open" boot collection came to town as the number exceeded 2,500. Colorado Springs was its last stop because the figures began to require too many boots to unpack at each stop. We met again in the park for the 3,000th, but I'm not going to eulogize any more boots until the number reaches 50,000. 1308
Homeless vets, the Iraq generation
There's a little discount store I like to frequent where I get inexpensive health food. I crossed paths there today with some homeless young men. It was only a matter of time I thought, before the truly needy discovered this little store, known so far only by less needy bohemians. 442
Support our snively troops
We've had a spate of vandalism at Camp Casey of late. It's usually the same thing: lights broken, cinder blocks smashed, chairs upturned, fire pit stolen, banners torn and taken. They've taken STOP THE WAR, END WAR, WHAT NOBLE CAUSE, DEMOCRACY DEMANDS NON-VIOLENCE and many others. We simply make more. But they always leave the banner that reads SUPPORT OUR TROOPS - BRING THEM HOME NOW. What self-serving ninnies! 220