RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
November 12, 2014 at 10:13 pm
(This post was last modified: November 12, 2014 at 10:31 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(November 12, 2014 at 6:04 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: No offense to anyone, but I've pretty well had it with the never-ending panegyrics that make military personnel out to be some special class of person. Did I say 'person'? I meant 'archangel'.
They're no different than anyone else. Some of them are exemplary human beings, some of them are scum. People who are not forced into military service tend to join up either in a fit of nationalism (which a good deal of them come to regret) or because they aren't trained or fit for anything in the private sector.
And before I'm lambasted over this:
-One of my brothers served in the RAF.
-Another was in the Royal Marines.
-My mother was a medic in the Vietnam war.
I've got two nephews and two nieces in the military.
Soldiers do a fine job, generally. But then, so do butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.
Boru
No argument here. The fetishization of servicemen, and (here in America) policemen and firefighters (and veterans of those fields) is overboard.
(November 12, 2014 at 10:09 pm)whateverist Wrote: Whatever moral horrors are committed belong to all of us by virtue of the system we allow to perpetuate itself.
One of the reasons I didn't make a career of the service was a bombstrike that happened in 1991 which killed 500+ Iraqi civilians in a bunker. It tore away the youthful idea that i was "in the rear with the gear" and therefore had clean hands. That plane, and that bomb, wasn't from my base; but we were launching a 3-ship B-52 mission every three hours around the clock, 153 unguided 750-pound bombs in each flight, and we all knew they weren't the most accurate things in the world; and our Bomb Wing was tasked with attacking industry in northern Iraq. Industry located in cities.
When I saw the dead being pulled out of that bunker on Spanish news, it hit me that our bombs most likely left the same mangled bodies, noncombatant, and while I kept on at the mission, that uneasiness meant that I wouldn't look at myself or my service the same way again.
I'm not always the fastest learner. That was when I learned that there was plenty of blood to go around, and I had ought to keep it off my hands unless absolutely necessary.
