I was deployed to Iraq during the surge. I don't know about others, but I'm now very aware of having been deceived. Consider this: supposedly, Al Qaeda in Iraq was chased out of Iraq into Syria. In Syria, they were renamed and then (this much is an open secret now) became a proxy army for DC to destabilize Syria. They were armed and supported by our government. Their efforts caused a massive refugee crisis and literal genocide of people like the Yazidi with whom I had worked closely. (Yes I am still angry about that.) The end result was that the US obtained some oil fields and the character of the European population was permanently altered. At what point did Al Qaeda go from being an ostensibly independent operator in Iraq to a US government run entity? Was there such a transition? Were they ever independent?
As for traumatic brain injury, I have a story that haunts me. When I was in transit during my deployment at, I think, Balad air base, I met a very young soldier. He was staying in the 'transient tents,' which are a horribly depressing place where personnel seeking transportation stay. There was no real sense of camraderie at all as you don't know anyone there and the people just come and go. They were also uniformly poorly maintained, dark, dismal and dusty. A nearby bathroom / shower trailer had a information wanted ad for a male on male rape case, to give you an idea of how charming of a place this was.
He had been in Iraq for less than three weeks. He seemed confused. I asked him what base he was at in what part of the country. He didn't know. He told me that he had been the top turret gunner of an MRAP (large armored personnel carrier like a milk truck with armor) when his vehicle was struck directly by a large IED from under the roadbed. These were specifically for destroying larger, well armored vehicles unlike EFP. Look up a picture of an MRAP and imagine the extent of the blast necessary to damage them. They even had sloped bottoms to deflect these type of blasts.
Every other soldier in his vehicle was killed and he was concussed and thrown from the vehicle according to what he was told. He woke up in a hospital far from whatever base he had been at. He clearly had a brain injury and did not seem to know what to do with himself. He mostly sat on his cot in the dark.
I asked if he was being seen by doctors and he said they checked on him once a day. He had no psychological support, no one to talk to him, no counseling, nothing at all but a dark empty tent. I was shocked and horrified. That was the treatment that survivors of such attacks could expect. Most likely, he was eventually sent right back to his unit as they were extremely loathe to send anyone back home, especially if they lacked obvious external injury.
So that is the extent of the care that you might get if you volunteered to go overseas and "defend democracy" or whatever it is we were supposedly doing and got hit with an IED. Just remember that the next time they want to send people overseas, no matter what they say the justification is.
"Terrible Men" is an understatement. They are truly pieces of dung. So very many people refuse to actually look and see what is actually going on. Pure evil. Peace.
Along that line, I read this morning that Chuck Schumer said if the border bill is not passed then the US will send soldiers to fight in Ukraine. Only a selfish megalomaniac threatens something like that.
I am not sure that most Americans are being deceived at all. Most people have had enough of wars. Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal was a total disaster and that just highlighted the insanity of what this country is doing. Even parents from military families are telling their kids not to enlist.
I was in Vietnam for 19 months. 1967-1969. Marine Corp grunt in I corps. I lived out in the bush as our company roamed the hills looking to kill. It was a miserable existence.
I went over with idealism to fight the commies and help the Vietnamese people.
I soon realized that I was cannon fodder and that my government didn't give a damn about the troops. We were pretty demoralized but learned to cope in some twisted way.
Now my government is funding a genocide in Gaza. This is leading us into a larger war that we cannot win. It's not only Iran that we will be fighting.
Our stupid leaders are more than flirting with a nuclear war. They are risking the whole of humanity with destruction.
This article caused me to commit to inquire and act on volunteer opportunities at a local VA hospital in my area. These injured Vets deserve all the help we can give them.
My son suffers from ptsd, served in Afgh 2012. Then due to negligence and product failure suffered a blast to the face (tbi, and blindness resulted) while working as a civilian worker on a base in CO 2 years ago. We have 2 months to find a lawyer who will file anything. We have been turned away by 7 lawyers. No one will pick up the fight for his justice.
Yes… we’ve insulated the public and put the burden of service on only a few select few, often abandoning them after and neglecting the difficulty and discipline of their service.
My grandfather was one of those men. He served as a navigator for the Navy in the planes that dropped bombs and napalm and later in peacetime as a warrant officer charged with informing the families of the deceased and attending the funerals.
He despised those jobs. He despised the war. He despised the effects on the people affected by the bombs and in his later years when I knew him despised all war and warmongers. And he especially despised the chickenhawks of Washington, and he always cried and bawled at funerals. Though he met his wife through his service and had many fun times with his fellow service men, it also often spiraled ever briefly into the a statement of tragedy that would immediately end any story and leave him emotionally broken for a minute or an hour or a night in isolation until he recollected himself.
He was strong and far stronger than the fools who use public ignorance to make false arguments for war.
The past 4 years have been tough. My dive into childhood vaccines made me aware that MRNA jabs would likely be dangerous and unsafe. Then I stumbled onto the video Everything Is a Rich Man’s Trick about JFK’s death. Which made me question the Bobby Kennedy murder, Martin Luther King killing and maybe a few others. From there I watched a video about World Trade Center building 7 collapse. Which made me skeptical of the official September 11 story. Then I learned about the bankers and WWII. As I told a family member, who is in intelligence in the military, we, the US are not the guy guys! He concluded, I was right! Our government can’t be trusted and all the letter agencies are hopelessly corrupt. We have several grandsons and we won’t be encouraging any of them to join the military. God is unchanging, so my faith belongs there...
This is becoming clear to many, I think. It’s why Haley isn’t as popular as Trump. It is also why many are considering Kennedy. Throwing our young men and women away on foreign wars that have no benefit for our freedom is evil.
Thank you for writing this - it is good to know that these poor men are not completely forgotten in their suffering. I had no idea the number of victims was so high. Robert Gates, who became Secretary of Defense in 2006, writes in his book 'Duty' that, because Bush's Iraq war came from left field (in other words, there was no justification for it), it was completely unexpected as far as Defense was concerned. Therefore, Defense had made no preparation in resources for desert combat, or for civil strife requiring protection from IED's etc., resulting in the unnecessary death and injury of many soldiers. In the same way, VA resources were overwhelmed by the sudden unexpected increase in the number of wounded. A terrible story.
Very well said. We have all been deceived. By our corrupt politicians, by a medical system that has stopped putting its patients first, by the falsity of science, by our sellout media. My trust in anything is shattered. They will not protect us, nor our children. It is time we realized that we must do that ourselves and stop deferring to these false idols with their empty, hollow promises of safety and security.
I was deployed to Iraq during the surge. I don't know about others, but I'm now very aware of having been deceived. Consider this: supposedly, Al Qaeda in Iraq was chased out of Iraq into Syria. In Syria, they were renamed and then (this much is an open secret now) became a proxy army for DC to destabilize Syria. They were armed and supported by our government. Their efforts caused a massive refugee crisis and literal genocide of people like the Yazidi with whom I had worked closely. (Yes I am still angry about that.) The end result was that the US obtained some oil fields and the character of the European population was permanently altered. At what point did Al Qaeda go from being an ostensibly independent operator in Iraq to a US government run entity? Was there such a transition? Were they ever independent?
As for traumatic brain injury, I have a story that haunts me. When I was in transit during my deployment at, I think, Balad air base, I met a very young soldier. He was staying in the 'transient tents,' which are a horribly depressing place where personnel seeking transportation stay. There was no real sense of camraderie at all as you don't know anyone there and the people just come and go. They were also uniformly poorly maintained, dark, dismal and dusty. A nearby bathroom / shower trailer had a information wanted ad for a male on male rape case, to give you an idea of how charming of a place this was.
He had been in Iraq for less than three weeks. He seemed confused. I asked him what base he was at in what part of the country. He didn't know. He told me that he had been the top turret gunner of an MRAP (large armored personnel carrier like a milk truck with armor) when his vehicle was struck directly by a large IED from under the roadbed. These were specifically for destroying larger, well armored vehicles unlike EFP. Look up a picture of an MRAP and imagine the extent of the blast necessary to damage them. They even had sloped bottoms to deflect these type of blasts.
Every other soldier in his vehicle was killed and he was concussed and thrown from the vehicle according to what he was told. He woke up in a hospital far from whatever base he had been at. He clearly had a brain injury and did not seem to know what to do with himself. He mostly sat on his cot in the dark.
I asked if he was being seen by doctors and he said they checked on him once a day. He had no psychological support, no one to talk to him, no counseling, nothing at all but a dark empty tent. I was shocked and horrified. That was the treatment that survivors of such attacks could expect. Most likely, he was eventually sent right back to his unit as they were extremely loathe to send anyone back home, especially if they lacked obvious external injury.
So that is the extent of the care that you might get if you volunteered to go overseas and "defend democracy" or whatever it is we were supposedly doing and got hit with an IED. Just remember that the next time they want to send people overseas, no matter what they say the justification is.
El Gato Malo circulated a meme recently: "They're doing it again ... because you didn't hang them the first time."
"Terrible Men" is an understatement. They are truly pieces of dung. So very many people refuse to actually look and see what is actually going on. Pure evil. Peace.
Along that line, I read this morning that Chuck Schumer said if the border bill is not passed then the US will send soldiers to fight in Ukraine. Only a selfish megalomaniac threatens something like that.
I am not sure that most Americans are being deceived at all. Most people have had enough of wars. Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal was a total disaster and that just highlighted the insanity of what this country is doing. Even parents from military families are telling their kids not to enlist.
I was in Vietnam for 19 months. 1967-1969. Marine Corp grunt in I corps. I lived out in the bush as our company roamed the hills looking to kill. It was a miserable existence.
I went over with idealism to fight the commies and help the Vietnamese people.
I soon realized that I was cannon fodder and that my government didn't give a damn about the troops. We were pretty demoralized but learned to cope in some twisted way.
Now my government is funding a genocide in Gaza. This is leading us into a larger war that we cannot win. It's not only Iran that we will be fighting.
Our stupid leaders are more than flirting with a nuclear war. They are risking the whole of humanity with destruction.
I'm ashamed to be an American.
Let us not forget the terrible women as well...anyone met Nikki Haley?
This article caused me to commit to inquire and act on volunteer opportunities at a local VA hospital in my area. These injured Vets deserve all the help we can give them.
My son suffers from ptsd, served in Afgh 2012. Then due to negligence and product failure suffered a blast to the face (tbi, and blindness resulted) while working as a civilian worker on a base in CO 2 years ago. We have 2 months to find a lawyer who will file anything. We have been turned away by 7 lawyers. No one will pick up the fight for his justice.
True and an older generation of soldiers could probably say the same thing about Vietnam!
Yes… we’ve insulated the public and put the burden of service on only a few select few, often abandoning them after and neglecting the difficulty and discipline of their service.
My grandfather was one of those men. He served as a navigator for the Navy in the planes that dropped bombs and napalm and later in peacetime as a warrant officer charged with informing the families of the deceased and attending the funerals.
He despised those jobs. He despised the war. He despised the effects on the people affected by the bombs and in his later years when I knew him despised all war and warmongers. And he especially despised the chickenhawks of Washington, and he always cried and bawled at funerals. Though he met his wife through his service and had many fun times with his fellow service men, it also often spiraled ever briefly into the a statement of tragedy that would immediately end any story and leave him emotionally broken for a minute or an hour or a night in isolation until he recollected himself.
He was strong and far stronger than the fools who use public ignorance to make false arguments for war.
The past 4 years have been tough. My dive into childhood vaccines made me aware that MRNA jabs would likely be dangerous and unsafe. Then I stumbled onto the video Everything Is a Rich Man’s Trick about JFK’s death. Which made me question the Bobby Kennedy murder, Martin Luther King killing and maybe a few others. From there I watched a video about World Trade Center building 7 collapse. Which made me skeptical of the official September 11 story. Then I learned about the bankers and WWII. As I told a family member, who is in intelligence in the military, we, the US are not the guy guys! He concluded, I was right! Our government can’t be trusted and all the letter agencies are hopelessly corrupt. We have several grandsons and we won’t be encouraging any of them to join the military. God is unchanging, so my faith belongs there...
This is becoming clear to many, I think. It’s why Haley isn’t as popular as Trump. It is also why many are considering Kennedy. Throwing our young men and women away on foreign wars that have no benefit for our freedom is evil.
Thank you for writing this - it is good to know that these poor men are not completely forgotten in their suffering. I had no idea the number of victims was so high. Robert Gates, who became Secretary of Defense in 2006, writes in his book 'Duty' that, because Bush's Iraq war came from left field (in other words, there was no justification for it), it was completely unexpected as far as Defense was concerned. Therefore, Defense had made no preparation in resources for desert combat, or for civil strife requiring protection from IED's etc., resulting in the unnecessary death and injury of many soldiers. In the same way, VA resources were overwhelmed by the sudden unexpected increase in the number of wounded. A terrible story.
I don't generally like to be persnickety about grammar, but your posts would benefit greatly from a bit of proofreading.
Otherwise, I highly value your content and read everything you post
Very well said. We have all been deceived. By our corrupt politicians, by a medical system that has stopped putting its patients first, by the falsity of science, by our sellout media. My trust in anything is shattered. They will not protect us, nor our children. It is time we realized that we must do that ourselves and stop deferring to these false idols with their empty, hollow promises of safety and security.