It’s 99 years since the war to end all wars ended on November 11, 1917 on a rail car in in the forest of Compiègne, France. Veterans Day, known originally Armistice Day, which began in 1919 and became a legal holiday in 1938. It was after WW2 when a campaign was started to change the …
Tag: Veterans
Nov 14 2013
The Cost of War for Soldiers
In a three part interview that appropriately began on Veterans’ Day, journalist, author and photographer discussed her latest book They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars-The Untold Story with Jaisal Noor, the Real News Network producer.
Transcript can be read here
Transcript can be read here
Transcript can be read here
They Didn’t Know What They Were Getting Into: The Cost of War American-Style
by Ann Jones, TomDispatch
The last time I saw American soldiers in Afghanistan, they were silent. Knocked out by gunfire and explosions that left them grievously injured, as well as drugs administered by medics in the field, they were carried from medevac helicopters into a base hospital to be plugged into machines that would measure how much life they had left to save. They were bloody. They were missing pieces of themselves. They were quiet.
It’s that silence I remember from the time I spent in trauma hospitals among the wounded and the dying and the dead. It was almost as if they had fled their own bodies, abandoning that bloodied flesh upon the gurneys to surgeons ready to have a go at salvation. Later, sometimes much later, they might return to inhabit whatever the doctors had managed to salvage. They might take up those bodies or what was left of them and make them walk again, or run, or even ski. They might dress themselves, get a job, or conceive a child. But what I remember is the first days when they were swept up and dropped into the hospital so deathly still.
They were so unlike themselves. Or rather, unlike the American soldiers I had first seen in that country. Then, fired up by 9/11, they moved with the aggressive confidence of men high on their macho training and their own advance publicity.
Sep 01 2010
“It’s not that I’m an uncaring person”
Well it seems that someone has stuck their size 15s in it again for the second time in a week.
Apparently Veterans are now “lesser people” sucking at the public tit.
I’m certainly not the first blogger to notice this story (though I did cover it yesterday- #20), there’s digby and Teddy Partridge and Oliver Willis for example.
My take is a little different. I’m not in favor of his firing or resignation. His honest exposure of the endless greed of our ruling class, that they would STEAL the benefits of the troops they so hypocritically and incessantly praise as well as food out of the mouths of babies and the elderly so that the richest one tenth of one percent can get richer by looting our public treasury, says everything you need to know about the morality and values of our “professional political class”.
If I believed in Hell I’d hope you’d rot in it for eternity you heartless, soulless bastards.
It will be interesting to see how Obama, who just last night wasted 18 minutes I’ll never get back, and his mouthpiece Bobby Gibbs handle this.
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