For some vets, the war will never end

[unhappycamper]

http://www.arabnews.com/news/556821

For some vets, the war will never end
Jamal Doumani
Published — Thursday 17 April 2014

Accompanied by the first lady, President Obama flew to Fort Hood, Texas, last week to console a mourning military community and eulogize three soldiers, all veterans of the Iraq war, who had been killed there a week earlier by Ivan Lopez, a fellow Iraq vet who had been under treatment for depression.

It was Obama’s second visit to the sprawling army post. His first was in November 2009, which he made to console relatives of the victims of a similar, more deadly rampage, that one by Maj. Nidal Hasan, an American-born Muslim whose parents had emigrated to the US from the West Bank and who, embittered by the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had opened fire at a medical center on the post, killing 13 people. (The then 39-year-old psychiatrist and Medical Corps officer was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. He awaits the results of appeals by his defense team.)

Addressing an estimated 3,000 people, a grim-faced Obama said: “Part of what makes this so painful is that we’ve been there before. This tragedy tears at wounds still raw from five years ago. Once more, soldiers who survived foreign war zones were struck down here at home, where they’re supposed to be safe. We still do not yet know exactly why.”

The why of it may not be readily clear, but what is clear is that in wars such as those waged by a big power — in far away places, against little peoples with cultures American soldiers do not grasp, in pursuit of a cause no one seems to comprehend — violence is rampant, incessant and traumatizing, visited on the soul of the invader as on that of the invaded. In a way, the war comes home with the soldiers.

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Kicking this today

Posted yesterday - but it deserves to be read by many.

War does something to men - and now women - and for the rest of their lives we who are only the relatives of these people - will never really know what it did to them.

[salimbag]

2. PTSD is for life

Sort of like alcoholism, we can learn how to cope, but it is always there. War is not a good thing.