Yeah, Bring The Troops Home- Fix Them Up Too-Damn It!-A Soldier’s Story  

 

From The Pen Of Sam Eaton

The organization I support, Veterans for Peace, as an associate member since I am not a veteran, although everybody who I work with calls me a “veteran” after so many years as an anti-warrior has just the right slogan about the now seemingly endless wars of the American state-Bring The Troops Home (you fill in the blanks from where on any given day)-And Heal Them When They Get Back. (Some in VFP favor the use of the more specific-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal, you fill in the blanks from where on any given day, but under either slogan the second part plays.

Although I am not a vet I have, with my friend Ralph Morris, a VFP full member having done eighteen months of hard bush fighting in ‘Nam as he still calls it before he got “religion” on the issue of war and peace been aware since then through a million contacts with vets from the Vietnam War era of the whole range of post-combats reactions from grievous physical wounds to PTSD to suicide and to what we call “the brothers under the bridge” effect where guys (and now gals) can’t adjust to the “real” world and go off somewhere. Ralph knows that last one first hand since he and a couple of other guys from Albany that he knew spent some time, not a long time in his case like in some others,  under the bridges and the “hobo jungle” camps along the railroad tracks of East Coast.

Now as the link below will relate the guys (and gals) from the Iraq and Afghan wars are starting to exhibit along with that high rate of suicide and other issues that we are aware of the same inability to adjust to their “real” world. Yeah, damn it, we have it right-heal them when they get back-and I hope the brother in the story gets “found.”      

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/05/437559840/after-afghanistan-a-father-came-home-then-disappeared