I avoided it by getting married and having a child. But I would not have gone under any circumstances. War is about the stupidest thing human beings can do. Sometimes you're forced into it as a last resort. But the most painful war is the war in which tens of thousands are killed and countless others are maimed or psychologically damaged for life for no good reason. Such a war was Vietnam.
Such a war is Iraq. It's Vietnam all over again in spades. A war for nothing, in which thousands die and tens of thousands are wounded, physically and psychologically.
Did we learn nothing from Vietnam?
From today's New York Times:
"The nation's hard-pressed health care system for veterans is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war, veterans' advocates and military doctors say.
An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000."
This on top of the thousands who have lost their lives and the tens of thousands who have lost limbs or gone insane. And the families at home. In Vietnam there were wives and girl friends back home. Now there are children who will lose their fathers and even their mothers.
They tell these soldiers that they're fighting to protect America and to destroy the "terrorists" before they can attack us here. They tell them they are "protecting America from the evil-doers". I'm actually glad that a lot of them believe that nonsense. It might help reduce the greater pain of knowing, as many Vietnam veterans do, that this was a horrible and pathetic waste of decent people's lives.
No, I didn't go to Vietnam. And I'm glad of it. I just wish those poor bastards who went to Iraq had made the same decision.
