Hmm. I've out of this thread for a while, but in catching up I'm struck by a single thought: The line between being anti-war and being anti-soldier appear to be blurred.
I'm anti-war. If I'd been in the room with Bush when he announced he was going to invade a country that had no ability to harm us based on a bunch of already debunked BS and over the objections of the entire UN nuclear inspection team who
knew there were no nukes in Iraq, I'd be dead or on death row by now. I could not believe my country had betrayed everything I thought it stood for like that.
However, our soldiers have bravely done what they were told to do. Hundreds of thousands of them over more than ten years. In their service to this country, they've been broken, they've seen horrors we cannot imagine, and they push themselves to limits most of us could never endure. They learn to compartmentalize their physical pain, the emotional pain of seeing civilians and fellow soldiers killed and maimed, and they
do their jobs.
Most of them are in their late teens and early 20's. Do they make errors in judgment? Oh hell yes. It is war. Black humor gets them over the hump. A few of them go over the edge, and become what they are fighting. Those are court marshaled and punished, as they should be.
But to see a group of young soldiers simply peeing on a corpse and to go bat**** insane over it ... really, people. I mean, really. If being peed on is the most heinous act a person can do to another person, then just about every x-frat boy on the planet has committed the same heinous act... on live people!
It's okay to be against the war, but when we take abhorrance of the war itself and transfer that hatred to the young men and women who are serving their countries by doing their job, then it's gone too far. This is the type of rhetoric that makes otherwise normal people spit on a young man in uniform returning from VietNam. I saw that ugliness decades back, and I will NOT be silent when I see the seeds of that hatred being planted again.
Take a breath, take a break, and think about what some of you are really, really saying in this thread. Please.