How to Truly Honor the Troops

Don't send them off to war over and over again while the rest of us go on with normal life, paying scant attention to the war that is all to very real for them, making no sacrifice while they and their families sacrifice everything.

That's it pure and simple.

And don't be surprised when some go over the edge.

[The veterans'] campaign was called Operation Recovery and its message was simple: stop deploying military personnel who have been identified as suffering some form of trauma...they have a right to heal. The young vets were protesting this policy in response to recently leaked stories of US soldiers killing innocent Afghans for sport. Ethan McCord, one of about fifteen veterans gathered, said:

"This is what happens to traumatized soldiers that have gone on multiple deployments and we send them to Afghanistan into the same environment that traumatized them to begin with and you place them on psychotropic drugs and then you hand them a weapon and turn them loose on the streets. What do you expect will happen?"

The quote is from The Veteran, the quarterly newspaper of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The Spring 2011 edition which is not online has an article quoting Douglas MacArthur that I thought worth sharing,

In the evolution of civilization , if it is to survive,, all men cannot fail eventually to adopt Gandhi's belief that the process of mass application of force to resolve contentious issues is fundamentally not only wrong but contains within itself the germs of self-destruction

The United States would do well to follow this advice. It would stop the bleeding in so many ways.