A response to Mia

I started to respond to Mia's comment on the thread below, but it got so long I figured I'd post it as a separate post.

War does change people, because it demands that the people who fight in them suspend their humanity in order to serve a purpose higher than themselves. I believe that the sacrafice of soldiers, the willingness to take on the responsibility of killing and dying in order to serve their country, is the greatest service and highest sacrafice that anyone can make, but I think it's often done in the wrong way. I think that there should be two different types of soldiers--career people and four year types. The four year types should be responsible for police actions, reconstruction, battlefield operations, etc. They should work completely independently from the career people.

Any time you move into an area with potential hostile forces mixed with the people you are tasked with protecting, you're setting yourself up for a Mei Lai situation. This kind of shit wouldn't happen in America. National Guardsmen wouldn't shoot American protesters in the street because they identify too strongly with them. It's too difficult to disassociate. But the Vietnamese? The Iraqis? The Koreans? When we're culturally so different, many of the barriers that usually inhibit that kind of behavior break down psychologically. It's easier, psychologically, for Americans to disassociate themselves from the atrocities of war when they are in conflict with a people so different than themselves.

When people are asked to disassociate so that they can kill, and they are simultaneously being told that these same people are the ones they are protecting because of their basic humanity, they schism. It's fucked up. These guys are being asked to make the sacrafice of their humanity and their lives in order to protect a people and a culture that is alien to them, and they are simultaneously asked to kill the insurgents and the terrorists. The only problem is that they can't tell the difference, and they only have a fraction of a second to react. Under that kind of pressure, there are certainly going to be mistakes, but most National Guardsmen are not given the kind of psychological training to cope with the psychological consequences of their actions. The result? As a nation, we're going to be paying more for the psychological care of the veterans of this war than for any conflict in our history, other than perhaps the Vietnam conflict. And, if it goes on too much longer, I suspect that it will far outstrip the scope and scale of the Vietnam vets.

And that's my fucked up thought for the day.