Posted on 06/09/2016 4:28:21 PM PDT by huldah1776
I went to the market Where all the families shop I pulled out my Ka-bar And started to chop Your left right left right left right kill Your left right left right you know I will -Military cadence
“You can shoot her…” the First Sergeant tells me. “Technically.”
We’re standing on a rooftop watching black smoke pillars rise from a section of the city where two of my teammates are taking machine gun fire. Below, the small cluster of homes we’ve taken over is taking sporadic fire as well. He hands me his rifle with a high powered scope and says, “See for yourself.”
It’s the 6-year-old girl who gives me flowers.
We call her the Flower Girl. She hangs around our combat outpost because we give her candy and hugs. She gives us flowers in return. What everyone else at the outpost knew (except for me until that day) was that she also carried weapons for insurgents. Sometimes during the midst of a firefight, she would carry ammunition across the street to unknown assailants. According to the Rules of Engagement, we could shoot her. No one ever did. Not even when the First Sergeant morbidly reassured them on a rooftop in the middle of Iraq.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
for those who don't read sources...
snippets:
"Amy Amidon, a Navy psychologist, stated in an interview regarding moral injury that:
“Civilians are lucky that we still have a sense of naiveté about what the world is like. The average American means well, but what they need to know is that these [military] men and women are seeing incredible evil, and coming home with that weighing on them and not knowing how to fit back into society.”
…The people at home may not have pulled the trigger, but they asked the soldier to go in their place. What many don’t realize is that a 2004 study found that “grief over losing a combat buddy was comparable, more than 30 years later, to that of bereaved a spouse whose partner had died in the previous six months.” The soul wounds we experience are much greater and require the society as a whole to come alongside us as opposed to pointing us to the VA.
Link to all of Sledge's articles and posts:
https://medium.com/@benjaminsledge
I can only hope that this guy doesn’t feel like he had had it any worse than us Viet Nam vets had it. Don’t remember anyone at the airports welcoming us home.
They were picked up by these SpecOps squads and he never saw them again.
His other job, because he was not a trained fighter, was to clip the index finger from the enemy dead and bag them for analysis, count and catalogue.
He had married an Arab-American woman (he was hispanic, she was born in LA) in LA before he enlisted.
When he came home, he could not tolerate Arabic being spoken, really spun him up. Also could not stand the smell of the food.
When she refused to let him have a dog in the house (because her parents were devout) he lost it. Beat her up pretty bad and "kidnapped" his kid and took off.
In that group there were a couple of dozen guys that would come and go...dealing with their "stuff" and substances that helped them deal with their "stuff".
Some things cannot be undone. Some things cannot be unseen. They are ghosts forever haunting.
I thought of that also and considering the fact that Nam vets do have the highest rate of suicide I was hoping that with the younger survivors speaking out, they could help all vets.
2014 article quote:
“But while older veterans saw a slight decrease in suicides, male veterans under 30 saw a 44 percent increase in the rate of suicides. That’s roughly two young veterans a day who take their own life, most just a few years after leaving the service.
“Their rates are astronomically high and climbing,” said Jan Kemp, VA’s National Mental Health Director for Suicide Prevention. “That’s concerning to us.”
http://www.stripes.com/report-suicide-rate-spikes-among-young-veterans-1.261283
It’s a good article and Sledge makes some excellent observations. However, he’s really a bit new to this stuff.
I served for 27 years in the Marines, starting out as an enlisted man in Vietnam. I was more prepared than most because I knew many WWII and Korean War vets and listened to their stories and their advice well before joining. The bottom line is that all combat veterans experience life-changing fear, horror, and sorrow. It’s just part of the human mechanism. PTSD, or whatever they call it, has always been there in varying degrees. You can’t do and see the things that happen in war without it affecting you.
The sad truth is that we get fine and mostly naive young men and put them into something no sane person can fully accept and then do close to nothing to help bring them back. You’re expected to just “suck it up” and drive on and above all, not bother the people back home with your problems.
It is what it is.
Welcome home
The Jihadis are generally a pathetic incompetent bunch compared to the NVA or VC. They rely on Allah to guide their bullets. I wish we’d had that.
This Vietnam Vets and suicide is BS.
There's finally some very good programs in the VA.
That's not the same as all of society undertaking a burdensome outreach and giving support, but it is a step up from 1968 when the only PTSD treatment was a discharge and jail.
There are lots Viet Nam vets in these programs after all these years...still struggling to deal.
Only in the last 10 years...
““Civilians are lucky that we still have a sense of naiveté about what the world is like”
Maybe a lot of them do — those that think the hoards of 3rd world foreigners that are coming into our country will make it better.
“forever haunting”
Hope! Revelation 21:4 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
4 and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
Only unimaginable joy and peace. Now that is for eternity, but consider that after the return of the Messiah there will be no more wars. No more NEW suffering vets.
Getting guys in to get help is now the biggest obstacle, IMHO.
Her article and suicide is dated 2014 and it says vets under 30 are the high suicide rate. Hell under 30 in 2014 were born after 1984. I can flat out state that the Viet vets never committed suicide like these today. The drug problems were not Vietnam Vets in the mid 60- to even early 69. The real dopers came after mid 69.I never saw pot in SF , and; I first heard we had some in training in late 69 at Bragg smoking Pot.SGM Ferguson had me walk the 6th Group barracks with him. The Dr who said hippies killed his wife and kids at Bragg was my Doc., Jeff MacDonald.
It's the warrior culture.
A man is expected to deal with his sh!t and move on.
But there's a large percentage that are not morally, psychologically or temperamentally able to just move on.
And, of course, there are some that were in situations that would screw up a psychopath.
But they think that because they can numb it with a fifth of whiskey, they'll be OK. After all, all they have to do is "Man Up!"
It's a symptom.
There are Viet Nam vets still seeking help today.
Point of interest, the majority of ‘Nam era vets committing suicide were not in combat. Bryan Suits has covered this many times on his radio program.
It sounds like there are some good programs but the issue is that ALL combat veterans - men who have killed and seen their own men killed - are grievously affected, whether or not they ask for help.
Our armed forces should have on-going programs to assist all returning veterans to adjust and cope.
Like we train and prepare our forces before combat, we need to have a mirror-image program to guide them through their return.
If you do bother the people back home or ask the VA to help with your problems they take away your 2A Rights.
Only 21 states responded to the VA survey. That is where the 22 vets a day came from. What started the VA cutting Vets off pain meds was the youngsters, many who never deployed to Afghan or Iraq, who started this rash of suicides in 2009 with huge doses of SSRI’s and pills from VA plus the damn street. Any Viet Vet going through the PTSD BS now is because anyone can get it. It is a damn joke as a Major got PTSD disability for serving in Germany. Yes, he claimed he feared the KGB would kill him. Here is the article on the youngsters.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/suicide-male-veterans-jump/2014/01/10/id/546499/#ixzz2xulyeq00
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