Maybe being the mother of a son clouds things....I read Lone Survivor and was intensely interested in Marcus Ls childhood. He had training from an early age in the mechanics of combat...well as much as you can train a child. My son had nothing like that. So I start there. And I think about two parents who have problems with war sending a son to a war. Sending him with little to no experience in even hunting an animal. Maybe living with my WW2 father, never having in gun of any kind....even toy....in our home. Then I fast forward to a military problem in these two recent conflicts....high...extremely high suicide rates in soldiers returning. Now I am wondering if you arent wounded in war, maybe for a lot of young people the results are a lifeline of pain of another kind....mental illness. Now we dont like to talk about mental illness, but my feeling is that we all have it to varying degrees. So what if the breakdown comes in service?? Now Im in hypothesis mode....not to defend the current soldier being traded for Taliban warriors....but to just test my humanity. When we define war with certain restrictions on militarty behavior, we do it because deep down, we know war cannot be the answer and we struggle to find another way.... It is our humanity.Maybe other religions/countries dont have this kind of humanity, but Im proud to live in a nation that does..... So we swear to not leave a soldier behind.... Its our humanity breaking through...maybe to make war make sense....and of course, war will never do that. It is horrible, cruel, unfair, filled with hate and anger.... But we glorify it....and we honor it....and thus we become conflicted. So now we want to leave a soldier behind depending on his behavior??? What if he was suicidal? What if he needed treatment for mental illness? What if his breakdown came at an inopportune moment....he did not get back to the US to commit suicide???What if his rantings were ignored signals...what if he cried out for help to his superiors....but what if he was left to make a decision with mental issues in rampage mode? Can we just let this soldier come home, find out the facts, and proceed??? Any young person(23 when captured)who enlists and goes to war deserves this at the least. This was a horrific confluence of events, especially the 6 other soldiers dying....but war produces these kind of events..probably on a daily basis in most wars. One of our wars was a war of choice, a reason two of our former leaders could be arrested for war crimes if they travel abroad. These events happen in out of control situations like friendly fire(oxymoron) I cannot justify leaving one soldier behind, or for that matter being the judge and jury here, until I know the facts. In honor of all soldiers, I think we should hold the anger and hate until we really have a reason to be angry and hateful. .
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 01:21:54 +0000
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