Check out my comrade Young Chris aka Goldyn Child getting busy in his post this week at homebase.
Recently, there has been some disturbing news hitting the airwaves concerning our US soldiers over in Iraq.
The first being the revelation that a US Army soldier in Iraq participated in the rape of a young Iraqi girl and the murder of her family. Truly sickening. The next story revolves around a US soldier stationed in Iraq that killed 5 of his fellow soldiers. It just got me to thinking about the HUGE un-spoken toll that this war is taking on my generation. I remember being in ATL during my spring break, waking up semi-drunk with my homies (shouts to Brandon and the Henry family) watching CNN shocked and in awe (I suppose that tactic did indeed work) as they began to bomb the holy hell out of Baghdad.
Flash-forward to now, about 5 years and over 4,000 deaths later, and we have this news about these soldiers. Let's leave the actual casualties out of this. What about the many, many soldiers that return home without an arm or a leg only to be placed in a disgusting, insufficient medical facility (if you recall the Walter Reed scandal from a couple years ago)? That's America's way of saying thanks? As these soldiers are proof, the mental toll that war takes on you is beyond measure, something that also isn't taken into account.
I can directly relate to this as my Brother is a veteran of the Iraq war. I thank God everyday that he came home physically sound, but the mental toll, as he's told me, is something that is hard to quantify. The isolation, the fear, the anxiety, the nervousness, the sadness of knowing that a guy was killed who you just sat at the lunch table with yesterday or knowing your man died because a kid handed him a cell phone that turned out to be an IED. These feelings aren't easily purged, nor can they be forgotten as a soldier reacclimates his or herself back to civilian life. My brother can attest to those difficulties, he's just another example of young men, women, our peers, who return home just to feel more lost than when they left. Luckily, my brother has a network of family and friends that love him to help him, others are not so fortunate, and the end result can very well be manifesting itself in these acts that have been committed in the last couple weeks by the same young men and women that have sworn to protect our safety.
We all have to understand that, by and large, these are our peers doing this. Our contemporaries that are fighting and dying for this war. It is indeed our Vietnam, and the sooner that everyone realizes the tremendous shockwave this will have on my generation, the sooner we can go about remedying it. I have the utmost respect for all branches of the Armed Forces (my pops was in the Air Force for 24 years), thanks for keeping America safe. And that's not cliche George Bush bullshit. Shouts to my brother's dude Gino, who's currently on the ground in Afghanistan somewhere off that special ops. Yeah, he's hard core. So hard core he probably uses Chuck Norris brand toilet paper.
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