Watching the video of the shooter at the Ft. Lauderdale airport yesterday, Reuters said, he served in the Iraq War for 1 year. They quoted his mother as saying, “He came back a different person”.
Of course he did. You can’t kill another human being and stay the same person. We’re not built like that. Even if it was an accident, people are never quite the same. Even for a “good cause”, people are effected. The movie “The best days of our lives” deals with returning WWII veterans and their struggles. Jimmy Stewart — a hero and a good guy — didn’t want to make war look good during the filming of “It’s a Wonderful Life” because he’d been there.
Veterans of Korea, Vietnam have also told the same story. Now we add Iraq and Afgahnistan to the list of wars and mentally and spiritually injured soldiers. Why, then, do we continue to glorify war? Why do we think anything different is going to happen? We reasonably (?) give credit to people who died for their country. But for every person who made the ultimate sacrifice, there is someone who took that ultimate gift from them. Ordering people to do that, as leadership must, is something that — if done at all — must be taken seriously, regardless of the profits others make off of it or how it “helps” our economy.
And if we send people off to be soldiers, and we know it damages them, then why don’t we pay for them to get better? Can anybody explain to me?
Resisting with Peace,
John
Because It Matters 
“Why, then, do we continue to glorify war?”
I’ve never heard a single person, in my entire life, glorify war. Who does this?
And if a person signs up to put his/her life on the line for his/her country, I totally agree that we should take care of what happens to the person as a result. I think we’re at the point of understanding most of the consequences (not fixing them obviously), and it’s the duty of whoever is paying them to go to war to support the consequences.