Quote:
Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch
IMHO most people are repulsed at the thought of killing, and even NRA jackasses are a lot of big talk. When we specifically train a person to overcome that repulsion, we owe him or her a duty of compassion because I doubt you ever see the world in quite the same way again. Weirdly, even though we live in a world of talk-it-out therapy, the healthiest war vets I know say things like “I saw a lot of terrible things” but refuse to go into details. They swallow it all, and other than waking up in pools of sweat a couple of times a month, they seem to lead normal lives. I wonder if we’ll one day realize that you can’t talk-therapy your way out of PTSD, and that denial and repression are actually legitimate tools of healing.
But we want this fantasy that Mr. Rogers was once a death-dealing badass, and it’s probably true that if you give your youth to the military, we should have an option for staying in your whole life on a “we broke it we bought it” theory.
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when I was young I asked my two uncles who had been in Europe whether they had been in battle. My mom's brother said he had spent the whole war in Iceland. The other uncle told me in detail about his relatively boring experiences. He had not been in any fire fights, and twice shot at Germans far far away.
At my mom's brother funeral his son told us that he had been D-Day plus 2 or 3, had friends killed next to him several times and had seen some horrible shit- he was not about to glorify it or even mention it to scrawny little ass.
