Hang in there, fella. I think all of you servicemen are getting screwed six ways from Sunday. The truth is the military doesn’t have enough people to fulfill its mission but all the politicians of both parties know that a draft isn’t politically viable. So they make the same people go back for tour after tour, they make reservists stay well beyond what they agreed to when they signed up, the whole thing sucks. I do think your hope of getting this over and done with is better with a Democratic administration as every single Republican seems to think Bush did and is doing the right thing.
Doors, not much given to proffer personal advice on-line, if only because of the obvious fact that there’s nothing “personal” about back and forth commiserating, hand-holding/wringing, exposing-your-innards-to-a-bazillion-strangers and hoping to get some sort of life-support line from doing so. Or so I opine, for it seems that many others are rather obvlivious of said fact, what with the way they vomit their intimacies on the Internets; but that’s a whole 'nother topic, and one that doesn’t hold much interest for me.
Coming back to this one, you invite us in your OP to “interpret this (it*) as you will” and I am willing, for a change, to take you up on your invite. And I interpret it to be a sign of maturity, empathy and rationality on your part – and that’s no small change for the gung-ho soldier I “met” quite a few years ago on this very site. Other than that, hard not to get into the politics of it all, but very much like you, I’ve also become quite cynical and jaded. Difference being, that I go beyond your own ‘being tired of being tired’ for I don’t think the time frame that titles your OP will amount to a hill of beans. Sure, I also hope against hope that I’m wrong on this assessment, as I hoped I was ultimately wrong about the whole fiasco that so sadly colors our world…and much more intimately, yours. For as much as I can try and empathize with your grivance, the honest to good truth, is that I can’t. In much the same way that the death of those nearest me can’t possibly affect you as it does me. Those are not my brothers and sisters dying out there, not even my countrymen and women anymore, as we at least had the collective common sense to get the hell out years ago. Again, sad to say I don’t see that happening to you and yours anytime soon, for the real anti-war candidates, from either Party, don’t appear to have, at this point in time, a snowball’s chance in Hell.
Having said as much, if my interpretation of your OP has any relevance to your real-life feelings, read on. If not, no point in going further.
Want advice? I couldn’t possiblky do any better than what, Mellivora capensis, so sagely already said. Worth another read if you haven’t already done so, for what are your people really fighting, dying and killing for? Surely (or should that still be “hopefully”?) not many left thant still buy the same tired bullshit of the past seven years, that you are “fighting them over there there so you don’t have to fight them here”?
Afraid, that if you got to this point, I haven’t given you much hope. But, unlike others, I simply don’t know how to sugar-coat a turd and call it a Candy-Cane.
Do what you have to to get your priorities in order. Best of luck to you and yours.
As an aside, a hearty Fuck You, to OtakuLoki and his own interpretation and subsequent “advice.”
Contrast and compare what he says and how it differs from my own feelings and Mellivora’s. Then ask yourself who has a better understanding of both, your OP and the true meaning of esprit de cours. If only because I never understood the latter as a form of Social Darwinism and the former because it comes from the heart. We report, you decide.
Cheers.
Agreed. Whether it’s her or his hand won’t much matter either.
But… I do think we will at least begin to draw down troops faster, even though I think we’ll still have plenty over there 5 years from now. Unfortunately, a troop draw down in Iraq will be matched by troop increases in Afghanistan. I wish our Western Allies would pitch in more on that front-- they are as much at risk, if not more, than we are from that area.
Sadly, I think this is right, but I think that there will be more movement towards withdrawal since there won’t be anyone for spineless, gutless, conscience-less Congresspeople to point to and blame for our remaining there.
The troops won’t be all coming home anytime soon, but it’s possible the fighting and bombing could slow down. I might be overly optimistic here, but I’m not ready to dismiss the possibility of some political stability in the next few years.
The hell? Telling him not to feel guilty about doing the job he’s been given is somehow a misinterpretation of “esprit de corps?” There’s nothing Darwinian about it; people are assigned to jobs where they can do the most good for the institution. That may or may not be combat. This is controversial?
What are you hoping for, Airman?
An end to the Bush era? That’s plenty close enough. But an end to the war is further off, even if a Democrat takes over.
And in any case, pinning your personal happiness on the political situation is a dangerous thing at any time. So is being guilty over things not in your control. You have done far more than most of us for your country - if anyone should feel guilt, is is the rest of us.
There is no accounting for the accident of fate that allows someone to walk away from a battle and requires another to die.
None of this will make you feel any better now, of course, but enough people telling you this over time may help you to accept it.
I came in here to make the point Mr. Moto’s making. Unfortuantely, the end of Bush’s term doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the pointless deaths of your friends and colleagues. Things are fucked up real good, both in Iraq and right here in the good old U.S.A.
Call me crazy (and you can do that, as I was diagnosed last week with PTSD) but I happen to think that the ideals that the U.S. was founded on are still alive and we’ll carry on through this.
No need to feel guilty, just do your part and we’ll muddle though somehow.
At least that’s what keeps me going here in Afghanistan; the thought that the ideas many better men than me have died for are intact and that this all mean something.
I seem to recall that there have been studies showing that significant numbers of Americans don’t believe in separation of powers, in separation of church and state, in free speech, etc. … So, the provenance of our ideals seem to be eroding.
And even if our ideals are still strong, there are changes that have been wrought by the Bush administration that will be very difficult to undo, including changes at the administrative level (procedures, status quo staffing), changes regarding the relationship of the three branches of government, the sunken costs of the Iraq adventure that can never be recovered, and the changes in the political language resulting from the administration’s rhetoric. The Bush administration has changed expectations of the boundaries of the American executive’s power, and that’s no small thing. Once something is done once, it is more difficult to avoid the next time.
Yes, it’s possible to get over these things, but it’s no sure bet, and it’s not going to be easy.
My apologies for this seemingly non-sequitur comment. I stupidly thought you were recently stationed in Iraq for 13 months, 2 days, etc…
What is Henry Rollins suggesting that we DO about the war? First he says that he himself is filled with rage about the war but he knows he can’t do anything about it. “What can I do,” he says. “Who can I write a letter to? It’s not like I can grab the President by his lapels.” And then at the end of the speech he implores his audience to “do something” about the war (In that case, the conflict in Israel, but by linking to this I assume you’re applying it to the war in Iraq as well.) “Not on my watch,” is what he tells them to say. But he offers no specific instructions on what they should do about it. All he’s saying is basically, “get mad.”
But as he himself admitted earlier in the speech, just being mad about something is pointless if you can’t actually change it. Rollins is sending mixed signals all over the place here. What can we do about the war in Iraq? Just protesting it isn’t going to stop it. Electing a new president isn’t going to stop it, as others in this thread have said.
But your last statement is not a physical inevitability, but a statement of the choices that American people appear to be poised to make. The next President is unlikely to get the USA out of Iraq not because that is the only option, but because the American people do not appear to be interested in voting for someone who will make a different choice.
As tired as US-A-D may be about the war, the fact is that Americans chose to re-elect the guy who started it and appear poised to elect a candidate who wants to continue it.
If, in fact, enough Americans were to take Rollins’s advice, they could elect any number of candidates who WOULD end the war; the registered members of one party, another or both could cause an anti-war candidate to be nominated and to win, or the voters as a whole could cause a third party candidate to win. They could, every two years, deal punishing defeats to Congressmen who did not actively fight to end the war, and end up voting in enough of them to force the issue, or they could elect third party candidates.
They have instead chosen en masse, by an absolutely overwhelming margin, to do nothing. Almost half of all Americans chose, in 2006, not to vote at all, and of those who did about half voted for pro-war candidates (I am assuming here that at least some Democrats, like Senator Clinton, are essentially pro-war) and a substantial percentage of the other half voted for candidates whose anti-war position was soft or vague. The number of people who bothered to vote AND voted for clearly anti-war candidates was a small fraction of enfranchised Americans. The fact is that Americans chose to continue electing more or less the same old jerkoffs. The so-called big change of 2006 was, by the standards of parliamentary democracy, a very mild shift.
None of this is inevitable. Countries with heavily entrenched party systems have seen sufficiently pissed-off voters make big, big changes before, and if enough people got mad they could make big changes in the USA, too. It does not appear likely to happen in 2008, but that’s not Henry Rollins’s fault; his advice just isn’t being taken.
The simple truth is that for most Americans, the Iraq War is a news story and nothing else, easily ignored. The “this percentage of Americans are opposed to the war” polls you hear about aren’t meaningful in terms of the likelihood of change in 2008 because they don’t weigh the importance of the issue. They foirce their responses into an adds-to-100 format but don’t tell you how strongly people feel about it. Apathy on the issue is high; the number of casualties aren’t that great unless you know someone who’s among them, and since it’s held statistically steady since 2004, it’s something people have gotten used to. The economic fallout is indirect and hard to trace back to the issue of government fiscal policy. Most Americans don’t really care, to any significant degree, how many Iraqis are getting killed or what the rest of the world’s opinion is. (And before anyone jumps on me for that, I don’t think the populace of any other country is any different.)
Rollins’s point is that he wants people to be angry, and to be angry requires caring about the issue. If enough people cared about the issue, there would be change. The reason there isn’t is because not enough people care. Rollins, to his credit, actually DOES things; he uses his biggest asset, his fame, to speak in opposition to the war (as well as cheering up wounded vets, which is laudable regardless of your war leanings.) His point is to ask people to care, to get angry, because - and I think I am accurately summarizing his point - the only way change can occur is if enough people give a sufficient amount of shit to at least vote that way. On that issue he is unquestionably correct. You get the government you deserve. Americans can vote in different people if they want to.
Will it happen in 2008? Possibly not, and definitely not as fast as US-A-D wants. But it CAN happen. I live in a country where our federal politics were dominated by two parties for well over a century - indeed, since before the country technically even existed, and for longer, as of 1993, than the Republican-Democrat duality had dominated U.S. politics. In 1993 one of those two parties, which had won the previous two elections with relative ease, was annihilated by the electorate and to some extent its own membership, reduced from governing status to being a splintered group of irrelevant opposition parties. This was almost wholly due to the fact that people were just plain fucking tired of them, wanted change, and were willing to vote in very different ways.
Obviously the dynamics of Canadian politics are different and I’m not holding up our 1993 election as being a model of anything likely to happen in 2008, but real change is possible anywhere. The U.S. hasn’t always had the Republican-Democrat-Nobody Else landscape, and doesn’t have to keep having it forever.
Light on the trigger or the mind? For my point is rather self-explanatory if you give it a bit of thought.
But here, just for you, I’ll pull out the crayons:
1-Doing nothing but following orders ain’t going to change a thing in Doors’ life. Unless you think of him as some sort of useful autistic-savant, doing “the most good for the institution,” while he withers away in despair and useless, though perfectly understandable, self-incrimination.
2-Which was exactly the P-O-I-N-T of linking to Mellivora’s ‘radical’ advice.
3-If you’re truly interested in learning more about this topic, I suggest you watch the Rollins link up-thread and then come back and read RickJay’s most-excellent explanation of same.
Right. Off to wash the crayon stains off my hands.
Just a bit of pertinent info that might help you feel a bit better: According to info from those who should know, injuries since the recent surge are down two-thirds from what they were pre-surge. Walter Reed, for example, is receiving a significantly smaller number of wounded.
So maybe things really are starting to improve in Iraq. (Even though they’re going all to hell in Afghanistan.) I hate this war as much as anybody, but it really does help for me to hear that some things, at least, are improving.
As for survivor’s guilt, I’m not sure what to suggest. My husband lost 26 buddies from his basic training class in Vietnam, and to this day is full of guilt that he managed to avoid being put in combat on a regular basis – even though he was working as a medic stateside, and then got shunted into data processing (and helped build ARPAnet). He was only in country occasionally, and just didn’t get shot at nearly as much as most of the guys he’d trained with. He still visits the Wall regularly to mourn.
I guess what I’m saying is that there are no easy answers. But you’re certainly far from alone in feeling the way you feel.
IS it so obvious that no one has mentioned it, or am I the only one to read
and put that together with the rules prohibiting a member of the military from publicly criticizing their superior officers?
I haven’t seen Airman Doors come back to explain his OP, but I think what he is subtly trying to convey is that he only has to hold his tongue for another 13 months. I wonder how many other active duty military feel the same?
eta: You all make good points, but I don’t think Doors believes the war will end, or even that a new administration will make a difference. Just that he can’t properly express himself about the current CinC, 'cause it’s like treason, or sedition, or malingering, or arky-malarkey or something.
You aren’t the only one; that was the message I got as well. I look forward to reading what Doors will write when he is free to do so.
It as old as dirt, the Spartans knew it, Shaka Zulu knew it, it never fails. Take a young man, break his connections to the life he knew and forge new bonds. There is (apparently) a human instinct of bonding with comrades, mildly in hunting parties, adamantine in modern combat. Men who have nothing in common become closer than brothers. Or, perhaps more to the point, men feel as though they were closer than brothers. Viet Nam, Iraq, Gallipoli, the effect is the same.
Leaders foster this, encourage it, and then exploit it. A man will feel he cannot speak the truth, for truth is disloyal, and the value of loyalty exceeds the value of truth. Most especially, he can’t speak such truth to outsiders, civilians, weaklings who have no comprehension of the value of loyalty.
It is not evil in and of itself, it is a form of love, after all. But it can be exploited and perverted for evil purposes. And the responsibility lies with us, the civilians, to accept and understand, and do our level best to assure that we pledge as much loyalty to them as they pledge to us, that we protect them as they protect us. And never to forget that to pound drums and wave flags while we send men to futile and immoral combat is just about as evil as it gets.
Which means it must be 6 O’Clock. You haven’t explained where on earth you pulled “Social Darwinism” from, besides your ass. Doors isn’t asking for anything to change in his life. He’s not asking anyone to stop the war.
Mostly he’s bitching about the fact that he is stateside while his comrades are in a combat zone. He may not feel like he deserves to be here and not over there, but he’s got a job to do here, so he can’t go to Iraq. Where do you find cause for offense in that?