perpetual memory loss

Yesterday I spent a good part of my afternoon watching the coverage of the assassination attempt of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords.  Obviously a ridiculously awful event that as it gets sorted out of the next few weeks I am sure will get even worse.  (Hopefully the fact that she’s Jewish didn’t factor into her being a target.  Although the fact that the kid was a fan of Mein Kampf and Hitler doesn’t bode well.)  This kid has serious problems and as time goes on the missed warning signs are going to become even more blatant with hindsight.  However, I want to talk about something that happened at the beginning of the event right as media and individuals were trying to deal with the events that had just occurred.  One of Rep. Giffords friends was on the phone with CNN and stated that she heard the shooter was “an Afghan Veteran.”  The commentator corrected here saying, “you mean, a Afghanistan War Veteran?”  To which she replied “Yes,” and it was left at that.  The shooter was a veteran.

Of course that was speculation and hearsay and it has come forward that the shooter is not a veteran or even someone with military training.  He’s someone who looks to have mental problems and is probably not affiliated with either party.  My problem is that the speculation that this person was a veteran of Afghanistan (or Iraq) was seen as totally plausible.  CNN and the interviewee did not mind blatantly throwing veterans under the bus by inferring that only a deranged veteran would do something like this.

The problem as I see it is that we have this meme that veterans are crazy, unstable people.  We venerate them out of one side of our mouth and out of the other we infer that they are not mentally stable and are prone to flipping out and going crazy.  This is something that I have been personally affected by and it is one of the reas0ns why when I meet people for the first time I don’t tell them I am a veteran.  People automatically assume that you are a bit off if you are a veteran.  It’s an unfair assumption and one that does further damage by perpetuating the stigma that is attached to PTSD.  This stigma only means that those with it are less likely to seek out help, increasing the likelihood that they are going to have to struggle through life by themselves without seeking help.  This in part explains why suicide is so high among veterans.

This idea of veterans being highly unstable is further perpetrated by Hollywood and their portrayal of veterans, which in many situations is unfavorable.  Movies like Rambo, Brothers, The Hurt Locker, and others show veterans that are detached, unprofessional, and on the verge of going completely insane at any time, for any reason.  Also to blame is the lack of care that veterans of the Vietnam War were given, and the fact that many veterans from that war are still struggling to come to grips with what has happened to them.  It is over 30 years since that war has ended and many of those veterans have been struggling with these issues on their own without the help of medical professionals, family, or friends because of the stigma that is attached to PTSD.

People tend to think that people with PTSD are unsettled and incapable of taking care of themselves.  It’s like we sit around in a pile of our own feces throwing it at people all day long.  The reality of PTSD is that the things that most people take for granted we struggle with e.g. sleep.  Day in, day out certain parts of life that most people have no trouble with we have to work a little harder (and sometimes a lot harder) at.  However, everyday we get up go to our jobs or school and work just as well–and many times better–than others.  We take care of and look out for our loved ones more than others because we understand the fragility of life and how fortunate we are to still be around.  For every one veteran that has a problem and gets in trouble there are thousands who–even though they have problems–are working through them and still are contributing to society at the highest levels.  It’s unfortunate that we think that the one is normal and to be expected whilst the thousands are thought to be rare.  Maybe that is why while gay jokes and racial jokes are not acceptable in many arenas–like workplaces–it still is completely acceptable to make these kind of statements about veterans (and don’t think that this is a random statement not based in fact.  This is a statement I make knowing that it is true because of the experiences I and others I know have had).

So the next time you meet a veteran instead of treating them like a rabid monkey try treating them like a normal person because that is what we are.  While you are at it instead of watching some ridiculous movie take the time to watch something like Restrepo.  There you are going to see that veterans are not crazy, but just regular people who performed extraordinary acts in extreme conditions; people who are just looking to restart their life and keep doing the things that many people take for granted.  If you’re feeling particularly gracious or pro-active support organizations like IAVA and The Wounded Warrior Project.  Those organizations are working to ensure that the politicians that sent us to war keep their promises and give us the care we need now that we are home.  They also help veterans out on a more personal level.  Hopefully, in time as people become more educated we will begin to see these issues in a new light and the stigma that is now attached to them will start to fade away, and also, let’s try not to jump to conclusions so quick–especially in situations like this.

I’ve been procrastinating on finishing up my shadow box for the last few months.  Today, however, is Veteran’s Day and I have nothing to do but drink beer and watch The Pacific, so I figured it was about time to get it done.  I’m not even sure why I got the bug up my ass to make up one of these, but about three months ago I decided I wanted to do it and now it’s done (with a big thanks to Pheebs for doing the heavy lifting and creating the actual shadow box).

HBO has had quite a few shows lately dealing with the war in Iraq, and they have all been well done and even-handed.  Taking Chance is the newest HBO film that revolves around the Iraq war, and like the others it is non-political and just tells the true story of one Marine escorting another Marine home.  I don’t want to try and deconstruct this film like some film nerd, instead I will just say that it is well worth your time.  I watched it last night–instead of the craptastic Oscars–and it was an emotional movie.  If you can watch this film without tearing up then you must not have a soul or maybe you’re just a cynical hippie (or both).  Anyways watch the trailer then check it out:

This past Tuesday, Veteran’s Day, I decided to go to Manhattan to meet up with some other veterans to mark the occasion.  Unfortunately, they were all meeting up on the lower east side.  I, on the other hand, had to travel from BFQ (bum fuck Queens) so it was quite the long haul for me; I might as well ride the subway to the moon.  It’s not that bad; it’s just that when I make these social visits to the city I always travel sans ipod and book.  That means that the hour and a half trip feels like three days.  Inevitably when I make these trips I hope for something cool or random to go down.  Usually nothing does, and I end up staring at the person across from me–making them feel exceedingly uncomfortable–or reading the same dumb advertisements over and over and over again.

Instead of taking the E-Train, like I normally do, I decided to take the F all the way, that way I wouldn’t have to switch trains at Washington Square.  It was lucky for me that I decided to do that otherwise I would have missed the craziness.  One stop before Washington Square, 14 St., some raggedy-ass bum got on the train, and started yelling:

“I’m homeless, I don’t have a home, give me some money.  I’m homeless, I don’t have a home, give me some money.  I’m homeless…”

Seriously he just kept up the same chant over and over again, and he didn’t walk down the train he just stood at the far end yelling.  It was kind of funny, well, as funny as a homeless guy can be.  Eventually he started to take some baby-steps down to the opposite side of the train continuing his mantra:

“I’m homeless, I don’t have a home, give me some money.  I’m homeless…”

He kept going on and on with the homeless thing, and nobody really gave a shit.  Everyone just kept doing their thing.  Then he got to me, and realized the futility of his mantra so he called an audible, and started freestyling:

“I’m so hungry I haven’t eaten in 5…6 days.  It’s been so long I don’t remember how long it’s been.”

“Did you know today’s Veteran’s Day?  Well I’m a Veteran, and I’m homeless and hungry.  Give me some money.”

I started laughing after he said that one and dropped a “Bullshit!” on him, but he kept trudging on until he was in front of these two older ladies (50-60).  By that time he had reverted back to his original mantra, and he was standing right in front of these ladies yelling it:

“I’m homeless…”

One of the ladies looked at her friend and whispered innocently, “What is he doing?”

Well he wasn’t about to allow these two ladies to question him.  So he turned around, crouched down into this pseudo three-point stance, while holding onto the vertical bar and yelled, “What am I doing?”

“What are you doing?  You think I am your fucking child.  No, no, no, no, NO!  Fuck you! I am not your child.  I’m fucking old.  Ancient like the Earth.  You don’t ask me what I am doing.  I ask you what you are doing.  You fucking understand me?  FUCK YOU!

(By the way he wasn’t that old, and he was definitely younger than the ladies he was antagonizing.)

Well these poor older ladies turned toward each other, and tried to will him to disappear, or to turn into a pillar of salt, or anything just so long as he left them alone.  Meanwhile I leaned back, and enjoyed the show, because he wasn’t done yet.

He stepped even closer to them, and tried to crouch down so his face was right at their level, and let loose with a masterful verbal tirade.

“You know how old I am bitch?  I’m so old you could be my child.  I should be wondering where you are going, and what you are doing; but I don’t cuz I don’t give a fuck about you.”

And here he looked up, and looked at everyone on the train.

“I don’t give a fuck about any of you.  Fuck all of you.  I’m fucking older than all of you.  You should all be giving me money.  Fuck you, you know what? Fuck you.  I don’t want none of your money.  Yeah, that’s right.  I haven’t eaten in 7 days, but I would take shit from any of you.”

Finally the train hit Broadway-Lafayette, and he scurried towards the door, but before he left he looked back and yelled, “Fuck all of you, motha fuckers.”  At this point I was laughing pretty hard, and I realized that the next stop was mine.  It’s amazing how quick that last part of the train ride was–it just flew by.  If only crazy ass bums could yell at people more often on the train; then my sojourns into the city would be much quicker and way more entertaining.

Today is Veteran’s Day, but it also marks the 90th Anniversary of the the original impetus for this holiday.  Veterans day was not always known by this name, in the beginning it was called Armistice Day, and was meant to celebrate the war to end all wars (that’s WWI for you non-history people).  The Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918 at 11:00 A.M. or at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.  That date quickly became a holiday in Allied nations to commemorate the many Allied troops that had died during the Great War.  Since then, however, we have been through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and countless other minor skirmishes throughout the world.

It was President Eisenhower, in 1954, who signed a bill into law proclaiming November 11th as Veteran’s Day, and as such, a day of remembrance for all veterans past and present.  Since then today has been the day (although for 10 years it was celebrated on the 4th Monday of October until it was changed back to November 11th because of the historical significance) that we all take to remember the sacrifices of those who came before us that helped to ensure that we would get to live in a free society.  So if you have the day off take some time to remember the sacrifices of other and then proceed with the drunken revelry.

In honor of the origins of Veteran’s Day I am posting a small selection from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which detailed her life through World War I.  This is one of my favorite passages, and if you haven’t read this book yet, you should.  It’s rather long, but it is well worth the time.  This excerpt comes as Vera is working on the French front as a nurse.  It is 1917, and the war has taken a toll physically, mentally, and emotionally on the Allied troops, and the prospects of victory seem slim:

They looked larger than ordinary men;their tall, straight figures were in contrast to the under-sized armies of pale recruits to which we had grown accustomed. At first I thought their spruce, clean uniforms were those of officers, yet obviously they could not be officers, for their were too many of them; they seemed, as it were, as Tommies in heaven. Had yet another regiment been conjured out of our depleted Dominions? I wondered, watching them move with such rhythm, such dignity, such serene consciousness of self-respect. But I knew the colonial troops so well, and these were different; they were assured where the Australians were aggressive, self-possessed where the New Zealanders were turbulent.

Then I heard an excited exclamation from a group of Sisters behind me.

“Look! Look! Here are the Americans!”

I pressed forward with the others to watch the United States physically entering the War, so godlike, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army. So these were our deliverers at last, marching up the road to Camiers in the spring sunshine! There seemed to be hundreds of them, and in the fearless swagger of their proud strength they looked a formidable bulwark against the peril looming from Amiens.

Somehow the necessity of packing up in a hurry, the ignominious flight to the coast so long imagined, seemed to move further away. An uncontrollable emotion seized us seized me- as such emotions often seized us in those days of insufficient sleep; my eyeballs pricked, my throat ached, and a mist swam over the confident Americans going to the front. The coming of relief made me realise all at once how long and how intolerable had been the tension, and with the knowledge that we were not, after all, defeated, I found myself beginning to cry.

So that’s it now go out and celebrate, and pour some suds out for those who didn’t make it.

Where it all began.

I’ve been so busy with my working on my paper and finding distractions to keep me from writing my paper that I completely forgot what today was.  I guess that could be considered a testament to how much things have changed of late.  Today is the Marine Corps Birthday.  223 years ago on November 10, 1775 the Continental Congress ordered the creation of the Marine Corps.  As legend would have it the Marine Corps, appropriately, was formed in a bar in Philidalphia–Tun Tavern to be specific.  Even then they knew that someone would have to be either crazy or drunk to join, I was both.  Just a little more than a year later, Christmas Eve 1776, a detatchment of Continental Marines would cross the Delaware River with George Washington, and proceeded to kick the crap out of the gawddamn redcoats at Princeton.  Over the years the Marines have made a name for themselves as fierce fighters and epic drinkers.  For over two centuries the Marine Corps has been striking fear into the heart of America’s enemies, and with luck they will continue to do so for the next 200 years.  So to all my fellow devil dogs out there Happy Birthday.

For those of you–like me–who missed this speech last night, here it is in full.  It is a good speech that hits on a lot of the key points that Obama needs to really cement over the next few days.  Namely their background, and how they have worked hard to get to where they are.  They are not elites, but instead are the poster children for the limitless possibilites that are available here in America.  I find it funny that the guy who is faithful to his wife and family, and worked extra hard to get where he is is called an elite.  While the guy who only got into the Naval Academy because of his name, cheated on and subsequently divorced his wife because she was disfigured, and can’t remember how many homes he owns is seen as the regular joe.   I’ll never get it.  Anyways here the speech.

YouTube Direkt

I hate hippies, and I think I always have.  The beginnings of my hatred, I’m sure, go back to my younger days when my pops told me stories about when he came back from Vietnam, and when he landed in the San Francisco airport he was called a “baby killer” among other things.  Then there was the Iraq War and all the crap that came about with that.  This story is old, back before I had this blog, but when I was stumbling around on Comedy Central I saw this, and decided to post a little bit about this topic.

The background is that Berkeley City Council and Code Pink were picketing the US Marines in Berkeley and telling them to get out of their town.  Read more here.  The funny thing is that I agree with some of the same things as these hippies, I just don’t like the way they go about it.  They are the flip side to the extreme hawks that we see around this country.  Both are wrong, and generally like everything, the middle road is usually the best course of action.  Also I just don’t like dirty, smelly, pot smoking hobos who don’t believe in anything but free love.  They also have a ridiculous, and unrealistic vision of the world.

I’d like to finish this unorganized rant with a quote:

There it is folks, we’re sitting here fighting for your freedoms.  You got the right to say what you want, we got the right to punch you in your fucking mouth if we disagree.

Ok this is a clip from the Daily Show of Rob Riggle, who is a Marine and an Iraq War veteran, interviewing some of these hippies.

Here is another clip just because I can’t resist to interject a little Cartman hatred anytime I can.

Semper Fi bitches.

After watching this superb mini-series on HBO I decided to pick up Generation Kill.  I took it with me to Houston, and I was able to pretty much read the whole book in the airport because of all the delays that came from Tropical Storm Eduardo.  As good as the mini-series is the book, for me, is even better.  Evan Wright goes step-by-step in his journey with First Recon, and events that get cut short in the show are more fully explained in the book.  The greatest strength of the book is the fact that Wright doesn’t try to turn the book into some treatise into why the war is bad, or good, or any other crap like that that usually gets in the way.  Instead he makes it unpolitical, and just tries to relay to the reader what life is like for the these Marines in a war zone.  He doesn’t hold back with the language or in any of the events that happen throughout the march to Baghdad.  I really found it to be a fair and impartial account of life in the Marines during the invasion.  This book is an incredibly smooth and easy read, and as long as you can handle reading a book with often times filthy language you should be able to cruise through it no problem.

One of the best parts of this book was that my old battalion got a little shout out, and I found out something that I have been wondering about for a long time.  This chapter was cut down a bit in the show, but in the book it goes more in depth.  The set-up is that a Marine is killed, and his body is taken into the town of Ash Shatrah and mutilated by the populace.  My company was called in, along with others, to look for his body.  The CIA was also called in, because supposedly Ali Hassan al-Majid or “Chemical Ali” was hiding out in the town.  Probably one of the most bittersweet moments of my life leading a patrol to find this Marine and getting complimented by the CIA, but yet not being able to find the Marine.  We didn’t not find him for lack of looking though.  We tore up the hospitals and other locations, and ended up finding intel on other terrorists, but not the missing Marine.  We were told by some of the elders that his body was taken out to the desert, and given a Christian burial.  However, we all knew this was bullshit.  Unfortunately we didn’t get Chemical Ali either, and after looking for him, and looking for the lost Marine again we had to leave for another mission.  I have often thought about the guy since then.  Who was he? was he ever found? does his family know how hard we looked for him?  Things like that, and then I read:

The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces.  They find him buried in Ash Shatrah’s trash dump.

Over six years later I finally find out what happened to the missing Marine.  That alone makes the book worth the read for me.  It feels good knowing that he was found, and that his body was brought back to the US to his family.  It’s just too bad that it took six years for me to find this out.

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McKrang! Strikes Again.

Ok so I have been trying to create a nickname for McCain, and today out of the blue, as I was thinking about this blog I wanted to write about him, it came to me, McKrang.  I think it’s perfect as his sums up his personality, and his temperament, but you may disagree with me, which is ok.  However if this nickname blows up, well then, I will be taking full credit for it, because I do not believe I have seen it anywhere.

Ok now onto the actual topic that I wanted to discuss.  This week Obama canceled his trip to Landstuhl military base in Germany to go see wounded troops there.  The McKrang camp contends that Obama would rather go to the gym or travel around sightseeing than actually visit wounded troops.  The truth, however, is different than what McKrang states.  Via The Daily Dish:

“A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn’t visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks. [...]”

We have longstanding Department of Defense policy in regards to political campaigns and elections,” Pentagon spokesperson Elizabeth Hibner told me. “We informed the Obama staff that he was more than welcome to visit as Senator Obama, with Senate staff. However, he could not conduct the visit with campaign staff.”

After being told this, the Obama campaign announced yesterday that it had decided it was “inappropriate” to make the visit as part of a campaign trip.

It’s unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon’s directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon’s directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.”

So it seems that the Obama camp, and the Pentagon had a little bit of a snafu.  I am beginning to think, however, that no matter what went down Obama was going to be screwed regardless.  It was a no-win situation, if he went McKrang would have attacked him for making the wounded troops part of his campaign, and since he didn’t McKrang attacks him for not having the time to visit the troops.  Personally I understand where Obama is coming from on this one, but I would think that it would have been better for him to kick the media, and all his advisers to the curb, and just make a visit on his own.

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