Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.

[abaris]

First off, let me say, I don't mean any of you posting in this thread. But there are a few general things and a few personal things I have to say about the topic.

Many people saying support the troops mean just that. The troops, not the individual wearing a uniform. Unless they have some personal involvement with military personell, they usually couldn't care less. It's just the political correct thing to say. They don't look at the people, often coming home as damaged goods for life. Because of what they have seen, what they had to endure and what they had to do.

My grandfather fought at the Russian front in WWI as an austro hungarian soldier. When he was still alive, I was too little to really ask him questions. The few times the topic came up, he always claimed to never have fired an aimed shot. Only firing into the air, that's what he said. In hindsight, I don't really believe him. When a charge of armed men is rushing towards you, which was the usual approach in WWI, I can't believe that you don't get to the point where it's simply "me or them". I think, he simply wanted to believe, he never harmed another human being. After he died, I got the diary he wrote in the trenches. Just a few scribbled notes between 1914 and 1915. The way he talked about shrapnel rain as if it was just a spout of bad weather made me think. Can you even begin to imagine, being numbed down to the point, where you take everything this man made hell throws at you, in stride?

My grand uncle spent the better part of his life fighting. First in WWI, then in the Austrian civil war of 1934 and ultimately as a republican general in the spanish civil war. That's him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Deutsch

I'm not entirely anti war. Some wars have to be fought and I stand behind the choices my grand uncle made when he picked his fights. But one should never forget what fighting means to the individual. A soldier going to war is forced to shed his morality, he's expected to kill and he constantly lives with the very real danger of being killed or crippled for life at any given moment.

In my country, we have memorial sites for the fallen soldiers of the World wars in every village. Some of them tiny villages and dozens of names engraved in stone. The soldiers of every nation in the World wars didn't even have the luxury of signing up as they have now. They were drafted into the armies, ripped from their families, their daily lives and their homes. And if they were lucky enough to return home in one piece, they were forgotten, just as they're shoved aside today. Left alone to deal with their memories, their nightmares and sometimes even their injuries.

Last, but not least, let me add a final bit. There are a whole bunch of videos on youtube featuring veterans against the war. Ordinary American soldiers speaking out about their experiences during the fight and their struggle after they got home. Some of these vids nearly made me cry and I would recommend that everybody has a look at them, since they are first hand accounts of what's it like to be out there.

Just one of them.