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Don Gates's avatar

Trump is a menace because of the GOP. Which is why I cannot see any circumstance under which I would cast a vote for any Republican in my lifetime. They fed this monster, and continue to do so.

One thing I've heard frequently is pundits saying the hush money case is a "weak case." This is false. I think they say "weak" when what they really mean is it's a minor crime relative to everything else Trump is guilty of. But this is not a weak case. Trump's co-conspirator was convicted and did hard time for this. And all these Republicans who foment unrest by framing this as a political prosecution didn't have a damned thing to say when Michael Cohen was convicted of it, because Cohen had turned against Trump and testified against him. These "normies" know this isn't about politics, it's about the rule of law, and they do not seem to mind that they're pouring gasoline on the fire. And these same people pray to God Trump will either drop dead or end up in jail before he becomes the party's nominee. Never Trump. Never DeSantis. Never Republican.

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Travis's avatar

Will Selber's piece today is a stinging reminder of personal past experiences, but I'm glad more veterans of this conflict are speaking up about their experiences, because bottling this shit up is exactly why veteran suicide rates are so high. Like Will, my unit also lost one of our guys in the turret to a sniper when we stopped for an IED just three months after Will had lost his. The kid was 19, on his first deployment, and had never even got to drink a legal beer back home before losing his life.

The note that Will ends on, the stinging resentment of a whole generation of veterans who were immersed in this business while the rest of the country mostly checked out, is something I still feel deep down in my bones every day. I compare it to the folks who didn't wear masks throughout the first two years of the pandemic. Back in 2006, it felt like all of America wasn't wearing their masks while the guys like us were living in the hospital every day for a year at a time, exposed to the death and suffering while everyone else just kind of put it in the back of their minds. I came home to NYC in 2008--the literal "ground zero" for the global war on terror--only to find a depleted social circle, an economic recession, and very few job opportunities on hand for a 21-year-old without college.

The War on Terror was the first real war we mobilized for on the contract system, and the civ/mil divide I witnessed during and in the aftermath of combat is probably what has affected me the most, even beyond the things I saw in combat. It felt like all that survival was for nothing when you come home to nothing. I asked myself "why the hell did you bother to fight for your survival all that time if *this* is what you got to come back home to after all of that struggle?" I returned home to NYC at the age of 21 as a 3-time combat veteran, but it felt more like I was coming back home as an immigrant in my own country. I had no community to return to, no career prospects lined up, and very little direction in life. I'm lucky I made it to where I am today, but I saw a lot of other guys from my old units not make it out as well as I had, likely for the same reasons I struggled with. I can now unfortunately say that I've lost more platoon members to suicide than I did to combat. I worry for the next generation of volunteers who will find out what it's like to go to a prolonged war on the contract system. They're going to get recycled too, and probably to a conflict(S) with higher casualty rates.

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