Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez tell a sad story in the New York Times (as published in the NYT's sister paper, the International Herald Tribune) (and mirrored here):Iraq veterans leave a trail of death and heartbreak in U.S.
Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, 20, an Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a convenience store in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the U.S. Army.
...
"Matthew knew he shouldn't be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven," Detective Laura Andersen said, "but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself."
As Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Sepi later said that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and "just snapped."
In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding on the pavement. The other was wounded. And Sepi fled, "breaking contact" with the enemy, as he described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.
"Who did I take fire from?" he asked. The diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively "engaged the targets."
He shook. He also cried.
There's a problem here, but if you're a five-sided monster you can't see it. You see something else.Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque tells an even sadder story:
Dead Souls: The Pentagon Plan to Create Remorseless "Warfighters"
Penny Coleman at Alternet.com gives us a look at a new program designed to dull the moral sensibilities of American soldiers in combat on the imperial frontiers: Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War.I'd give you more excerpts but then you'd miss most of the story.
...
This attempt to peddle magic pills to chase away the horrors of war is just one front in a long-term, wide-ranging "warfighter enhancement program" -- including the neurological and genetic re-engineering of soldiers' minds and bodies to create what the Pentagon calls "iron bodied and iron willed personnel": tireless, relentless, remorseless, unstoppable.
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Killing the soul is the ultimate aim of those who seek to create tools for empire, instead of recruiting citizens to defend the Republic from attack.
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How very strange it is: those who want to turn American soldiers into mindless, drug-addled mutants and send them off to kill and die in far-flung wars of imperial conquest are seen as patriots, noble leaders, doing the will of God; while those who would rather see these good men and women called home, treated with honor and respect--their talents and dedication applied solely to the defense of their own great country, not pressed into the service of a greedy, rapacious elite--are denounced as "traitors," "anti-American agitators," "allies of terrorism."
Read Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez.
Read Penny Coleman.
Read Chris Floyd.
And tell me: What, if anything, can anybody do about this?
I'm fresh out of ideas, but still open to suggestions.
~~~
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