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I had the opportunity to work for a year with a Viet Nam vet who’d made a poor readjustment to civilian life, too. His PTSD diagnosis was made in 1999, thirty years after his discharge.[/quote]
I have always had trouble sympathizing with anyone who suffers from the experience of putting on a uniform and carrying a weapon in a foreign conflict. I forgive 19 year olds for being gullible and naive, but everyone else who decides to be a professional killer, regardless of their politics, has agreed to open themselves up to whatever hurt comes their way. I don’t care if they believe they did it for me and others. That was their ill advised choice, not mine. I have always opposed involvement in armed foreign conflicts and am irritated by the whining of participants when they come to harm. What did they think would happen to them is such situations? They are not little boys and girls, they are supposed to be adults.
And when Uncle Sam double-screws them after putting them needlessly in harm’s way by then denying or delaying benefits, ..what a big surprise, eh?! Post traumatic stress is so common, it should be part of any contract. It should be assumed that every soldier who faced combat would have a degree of this stress afterwards. There is individual responsibiluty FIRST, then governmental.[quote=”jdocop”]Ah, Sprite, Sprite, Sprite. You obviously have not read all the posts here on this topic. As has been mentioned, those young men who were sent to Vietnam (that’s right; they were sent) were conscripts, draftees. So, how dare you to judge what happened to them when they found themselves in a situation not of their choosing. Professional killer indeed…….don’t know how old you are, and really don’t care. But, your statements are so wide of the mark, as to boggle the mind.[/quote]
We always have choices! They tried to conscript me in 1969 for Viet Nam. I resisted successfully. But not everyone at the time was clued into the reality that we always DO have choices. A high school acquaintance of mine took his physical the same time as I but he went down a different path. He stepped forward and took the “oath” rather than resisting as I did, and they shipped him out. I never saw him again.
This is a simple matter of weighing alternatives and consequences. If you believe enough in a cause to be willing to kill and/or die for it, then so be it. Setting aside the obvious immorality of that attitude,it just seems a little shameful to then turn around after suffering the expected consequences and crying about it.Thanks everyone for your comments. I respect and appreciate all the points of view expressed. As a veterans advocate, Vietnam vet, Gulf War vet, Iraq vet and 100% disabled vet, I merely wanted others to be aware of the plight of all disabled and nondisabled vets.
But, let’s agree to disagree. I don’t see any conscript who served in a foreign war to be anything resembling a professional killer, and I certainly do not see the Viet Nam who served as being immoral.[/quote]
I agree that we can disagree on the morality of killing. I know many secular and religious people can find reasons to justify killing. Morality can be adjusted to suit the purpose or argument. It is a relative term and so probably useless in disagreements like these. I grant you your moral point that killing is OK under any circumstances you see fit to apply. I have my own circumstances to justify killing which are probably different than yours. It’s a crazy world.
But the self defense argument for Viet Nam vets doesn’t fly. Carrying a weapon into somebody else’s country with the intent to convert or kill them and then saying you are defending yourself when they resist is no different than the 911 high-jackers saying they were defending their religion when they crashed those planes.
Of course, anyone who steps forward and agrees to bear arms in the service of their country is willingly submitting to the act of killing or of being killed. He/she is then trained how to kill. The two definitions below are simple and to the point;
Professional: a person who is expert at his or her work
Killer: a person or thing that kills.
Soldiers are THE definition of professional killers.I can think of a lot of jobs worthy of respect. Soldiering is not one of them.
Sprite, as someone who was drafted in 1968 to serve in what i considered a bogus, immoral war, i too had 3 choices,service,jail or canada.
I choose to take my chances because i didn’t like jail or the cold of Canada. I would like for you to answer John’s question that you “resisted successfully” in your previous post. It would be something i might want to pass on to my offspring in future years. Our ex president, with his father’s help, joined the Texas National Guard. How did you do it? thanks mikeI was advised that I could legally avoid being inducted by simply not stepping forward when the oath of allegiance was required. It is a constitutional protection, for what those are worth. The government had the option to harass me by continually calling me back to take the oath and I could have continually showed up and NOT stepped forward. Who knows if this method was a good one? Many went to jail or felt they had to run away to Canada. I was a scared 19 year old but I held my ground….I stayed put.
My draft lottery number was 51…out of 364. That meant my number was up and Uncle Sam wanted me for cannon fodder. I took my physical exam at Fort Hayes, in Columbus, Ohio in 1969. I was literally one pound light of the minimum weight requirement which meant that I was required to report back later to see if I had gained that one pound. The military can take a 250 pound fat ass and boot camp will melt that blubber away. But boot camp will not add weight.
Each time I was called to take another physical, I refused. I was called several times, I don’t remember how many. I was prepared to do whatever else it took to refuse to go that war. Fortunately, nothing came of it. I do not know why. The only action I ever saw in service to my country was being chased by a tank and US national guard at the Ohio State student war protests later on.[quote=”jdocop”] Beyond that, I have nothing further to say to this person, because I think it is unconscionable for him to be labeling as killers, GI’s who felt they had no choices. Worse, since he is such a staunch and well-informed pacifist, he is obviously unaware that very few soldiers ever saw combat, and fewer still ever actually had to pull a trigger in combat. tell him that the only professional soldiers they know are what we used to call ‘lifers,'[/quote]
Before you get all emotional and angry,read carefully what I said. I am sticking strictly to precise language here. I have no idea what you did or did not do so I did not call you a killer. I said that soldiers are professional killers.
Whether or not a soldier BECOMES a killer, they are all trained to be killers. True or false?And I repeat a truth that maybe you did not know when you were 19, but that you must know now; We all always have a choice in such matters. Whether or not you knew you had a choice, or whether or not you are standing by the choice you made at 19, I want it known that I DID know I had a choice and that I stood by it. I had no way to know that there would be no consequences. I didn’t risk my life, but I did face a substantial potential risk. And it is very probable that the 19 year old who charges off to war has not a clue as to what he is getting into. Dying in a war sometimes has more to do with ignorance than with courage.
[quote=”jdocop”]I certainly never heard of such a thing (refusing to take the oath of allegiance). I also never heard of there being such a thing as a minimum weight requirement for the draft. I do recall that I gained about thirty pounds in basic training. As for refusing to report for either a draft physical or for induction, that is the point at which we understood we were subject to arrest. So, are you also saying you were a college student at Ohio State? Well, that was the only exemption of which I was aware, other than 4F (the student deferment).[/quote]
I had no student deferment as I was not enrolled at that time. I was not arrested, only threatened with arrest. Like most kids, it angered me to be threatened and, at one point, I dared the individual contacting me from the draft board to go ahead and arrest me.
And, believe me, being just one pound under the minimum weight was the reason I was given. I was placed on the side of the room with the YF deferments, the ones with flat feet or mental derangements. In fact, they 300 pound guy next to me in line during the brief physical exam ended up on the side of the room set aside for those who were eligible for immediate induction. That amazed me. I was told later that people lose weight at boot camp.
[quote=”speedo5″]Sprite, as someone who was drafted in 1968 to serve in what i considered a bogus, immoral war, i too had 3 choices,service,jail or canada.
I choose to take my chances because i didn’t like jail or the cold of Canada. I would like for you to answer John’s question that you “resisted successfully” in your previous post. It would be something i might want to pass on to my offspring in future years. Our ex president, with his father’s help, joined the Texas National Guard. How did you do it? thanks mike[/quote]I have a question for you, speedo: If you thought you only had three choices, Canada, jail or going off to a war to kill innocent people, why on earth would you choose the least moral of those choices?
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