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Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
#1
Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
Probably something I heard on the radio got me thinking about it. I've never been 'patriotic' but when I was of age I was really torn. On the one hand I was really repulsed at the thought of shooting people I didn't know. But on the other I felt strongly that if I didn't do my duty it would fall to someone else who deserved it no more than I. I was fortunate not to have to choose given a high draft number.

But there is something -dare I say it- "good" about the motivations of so many people who serve in the armed forces. There is something nobel about sacrificing in order to protect and defend your kin and countrymen. For most it isn't a career path and neither does it benefit their future employment. They risk everything and receive so little in return. They certainly deserve our respect, our gratitude and our support to regain their wholeness when they return.

You can question the motives of the old gas bags who send young men into harm's way for, but not the motives of those who serve. People like Cheney and Rumsfeld make me sick. But the grunts get all my respect even though I'd prefer not to take them up on their willingness to sacrifice.
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#2
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
Thanks.

I joined the Air Force because while I wanted to pitch in on the country which had given me so much, I had no real desire to kill people. I enlisted in 1989, and was assigned duty as a firefighter, which worked out in the end. I did my hitch, played my small part in my small war, and grew into my boots.

It breaks my heart to see these wonderful young men and women have their lives broken on the wheel of bullshit money-grubbing politics. I marched against the 2003 invasion of Iraq because it was so clearly bullshit, and I will speak out against the wanton waste of our youth. There are indeed times when sacrifice is called-for in service to the nation, but it shouldn't be over the price of a barrel of oil, or a terror-distraction from the ongoing purchase of our government by megacorps.

/rant

Also: the truest patriotism is that which speaks the truth about one's country, in the hopes of not only extolling its virtues, but repairing its deficiencies.

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#3
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
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
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
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#4
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
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.



[Image: Bumper+Sticker+-+Asheville+-+Praise+Dog3.JPG]
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#5
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
Yeah, I agree it is tragic the amount of harm war does to people. They put themselves in harms way in more than a physical sense. They have no choice but to accept chain of command and to act as a unit. If that unit is put in a situation which allows harm to befall civilians it will be soldiers like this one who have to bear its burden.

I certainly don't put soldiers on a pedestal. They're not better or worse people than anyone else. All I'm saying is that the impulse to serve, protect and defend is nobel. Sadly once you take that on, military rules and training may put you in plenty of positions where personal honor must take a backseat to following orders. Whatever moral horrors are committed belong to all of us by virtue of the system we allow to perpetuate itself.
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#6
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
(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.

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#7
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
(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.

Couldn't be more true. Having been in Navy and stationed on a USMC base, I have seen some exemplary men and women, and some scum of the earth assholes in the same uniforms. There seems to be no grey area. I met so many people that I just had that feeling like I could learn so much from, like I just needed to be around them to make myself better. And time after time I met men and women who shook my faith in humanity.

I always feel a little guilty and awkward when people thank me for my service.

Two reasons:

1) I joined the Navy because I wanted to be a pilot, because my dad was in the Navy, and because I was just good enough to play Div 1 college football, and I had a good chance to start as a Freshman at the Naval Academy. Not because I had a special desire to serve my country.

2) I was in the Navy. My job was driving a $1.2B ship in a circle for 8 hours straight, then go to my office and make junior sailors clean their spaces, run drills, and occasionally do something worthwhile like launch/recover a hovercraft or facilitate an underway replenishment (UNREP). There was not a day where my life was in serious danger. On my shore tour, on board MCAS Miramar in North San Diego, I was certified and volunteered to facilitate PTSD support groups with Marine Corps/Navy personnel that actually had boots on the ground, and had real shit to deal with coming home. I didn't do anything like those guys/gals. I just had a mostly shitty job that didn't pay great. So I feel awkward when I get the same compliment as they do.

One thing I do know is that shitty person or not, being in battle will change you, and never for the better. So when I think of supporting the troops, I think of making sure that every one who has ever been in theater has the appropriate medical/psychiatric care.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great

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#8
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
(November 12, 2014 at 11:52 pm)SteelCurtain Wrote: One thing I do know is that shitty person or not, being in battle will change you, and never for the better. So when I think of supporting the troops, I think of making sure that every one who has ever been in theater has the appropriate medical/psychiatric care.

... and not putting them in harm's way unless its absolutely necessary.

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#9
RE: Veteran's day shout out to those who sacrificed to protect and defend.
Quote:Many people saying support the troops mean just that.

I'd support the troops by not sending them to fight asinine "wars" for the sole purpose of letting strutting buffoons

[Image: Bush_codpiece_debbc.jpg]

pretend they are heroes.

The soldiers have no choice and it doesn't matter if they joined because of love of country or because they couldn't get any other job. The leaders? Different story.
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