100% we should be showing the graphic images. The only way you get people off of their asses to do something is if they are confronted with images so horrible that it just instantly registers with them that shit like this needs to stop. It repulses them into action. We should have done this with CV too. Show the anti-vaxxers graphic vide…
100% we should be showing the graphic images. The only way you get people off of their asses to do something is if they are confronted with images so horrible that it just instantly registers with them that shit like this needs to stop. It repulses them into action. We should have done this with CV too. Show the anti-vaxxers graphic video of other anti-vaxxers dying of oxygen loss in hospitals while saying goodbye to confused families via Skype. Because the Trumpers never had this reality shoved into their faces, they could ignore the horror. If you start shoving pictures of dead kids whose leg muscles and arm muscles are sheered off from the bullets basically vaporizing the muscle off of their body, they won't be able to look at AR-15s the same way again. If they see enough mutilated bodies of children, it will burrow into their minds and they will see those images every time they look at an AR-15. You're basically planting flashbacks into their mind in order to get them to be repulsed by the same items they are trying to defend.
My own experience with graphic images of children and never being able to see certain objects the same way again:
In October of 2005, we were setting up security barriers for the constitutional election in Barwana, Iraq. The KBR trucks who hauled the concrete barriers out from their cushy FOB at Al Assad air base couldn't fit their trucks through the town's narrow streets, so we had to offload them outside of town and haul them in a few at a time with forklifts that had escort humvees attached as they made their trips back and forth from the KBR trucks to the voting center inside of town. Once we had been static outside of the town guarding the KBR trucks for about 15 minutes, kids started coming out to ask the KBR drivers for candy while we were sitting there. A few moments later, mortar fire started landing next to the KBR trucks. Two kids were vaporized instantly, with only shoes being left behind by one of them. The other two kids were riddled with shrapnel and expired before the casevac helos landed at our position about 40 minutes later. I learned the price of democracy that day--having just turned 19 the month before, but I also earned one of my first flashbacks that would follow me for life. I cannot see a child's shoes to this day without mentally drifting off into disassociation land and going back to that moment.
Point being: the imagery of dead kids tied to imagery of assault rifles is a powerful psychological deterrent, if we're willing to use it. The GOP will howl foul play, but they will understand that they will lose that fight against that kind of imagery and the emotion it invokes.
Agreed! We are far too comfortable in this nation, and it's time for those who are most comfortable (leaders in Washington!) to feel UNCOMFORTABLE. These are our children FFS. What does it say about America that we put fun and profit over our most precious and vulnerable? It's disgusting and shameful. :(
It's why I don't just think we should raise the age for buying rifles, we should raise the minimum age requirement for military service to 21 as well. The younger you are when you experience trauma like that, the more it sticks with you for life. Your brain is still developing in your late teen years. The pentagon just doesn't want to lose the opportunity to get dumb kids right out of high school to sign up under contracts they can't walk out of ("volunteer force" my ass). If they had to recruit from the 25+ crowd--or even the 21+ crowd, their recruiting numbers would plummet. So to keep recruiting levels manageable, they make the tradeoff of traumatizing contracted child soldiers for life instead of drafting the 25+ crowd. It makes no sense to me. They took my stripes away for underage drinking after my second combat tour right after we lost a guy. The way the military handles its personnel is a disgrace in comparison to what we give to them. At least there's the VA disability money I guess.
Agreed. I'd argue that because kids' brains are still developing, we should raise the age of consent for everything to 21: military service, drinking, driving, marriage, all of it. Set up a system of judges who can grant exceptions for all of that, such as emancipation from nasty parents.
Adults should run their lives as they see fit. Kids need more protection, as they're still learning the game of life.
The decision-making center, the pre-frontal cortex is not mature until about age 25. One of the worst things that happened to college-age kids is when universities did not have to answer to the parents anymore. It may have something to do with the explosion in student loans
Given that, one thing we could try is age-related permission for types of weapons:
--Raise the age for owning any gun to 21.
--At 21, you can own and operate only reduced-capacity weapons: revolvers or restricted-capacity pistols; pump shotguns; bolt-action or low-round semiautomatic rifles.
--At 25, when your brain is fully adult, you can own the rest.
--Create a national licensing system--safety, training, background checks, etc.--that allows underage citizens access to the full kit.
I would also raise the age for drinking, driving, and military service to 21, because of that brain-maturity science.
Most people are not adults until at least their mid twenties--this is due to a combination of actual physical development/maturation and simply having enough actual life experience.
The inexperienced and immature nature of youth is something that any military depends upon. You can get them to do stupid shit because they don't really realize it is stupid shit--it isn't fully REAL to them and their risk assessment is horrible.
I teach high school, I watch these people make bad decision after bad decision every day, multiple times a day.
Ya, I always felt at least slightly shit upon (sometimes heavily shit upon) when I was in the service (1980-88)... and this was in the era before serving was "cool" and "popular."
I went into a public 'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, " We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, go away " ;
But it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, wait outside ";
But it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? "
But it's " Thin red line of 'eroes " when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's " Thin red line of 'eroes, " when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! "
But it's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An 'Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!
On the other hand, soldiers have a well-earned reputation for causing trouble, even in peacetime deployments like right now in Okinawa. As long as they stay in the officers' club or the enlisted club, fine. But then when they go out "into the economy," they suddenly forget the manners their mothers taught them, even while doing mundane things like riding the bus.
1) The general youth of military personnel these days (and corresponding lack of maturity);
2) As has tended to be the case through most of history, many of these enlisted come from the lower strata of society;
3) It is a high stress job and it tends to lead to aberrant behavior (by civilian standards)--because, in the end, military culture is significantly different from civilian culture and the value systems and ethics are quite different. Being in the military is one of the more extreme versions of in and out group behavior.
During the Vietnam era draft, draft age was 18 but adult age for everything else was 21. People repeatedly lobbied to change the draft age to 21 on the grounds we should not be sending children to war. The appalling government response was to declare those children to be adults by changing adult age to 18 for almost everything (with a couple of exceptions that make no sense if the children really are adults).
The change has caused a number of knock-on problems which I won't go into now.
The military also took 17 year olds who were willing to go to Vietnam to avoid a jail sentence. I've heard stories of guys flying over there, then sitting on a Navy ship waiting to turn 18 when they would be deployed to an army unit.
Really appreciate your comments and candor on here over the while, Travis. Thanks for taking the time - I always learn something from your posts :thumbsup
Black lives didn't *really* matter to a whole lot of post-college white people until videos of police murdering them started filling up their Facebook feeds for example. Out of sight, out of mind folks. You give them the imagery and you force a choice on them. Vietnam ended partially because it was the first televised war where people back home could *see* the carnage they were sending their children to commit and they had to weigh the morality of the cause after seeing what was being done over there in the name of the "Domino Theory."
I spent several months in Jordan helping to provide emergency assistance to Iraqi refugees. The entire country was destroyed, and the Iraqis were, and are, deeply traumatized. I knew a man whose fingers and toes were slowly dissolved by acid, as a method of torture, and a woman who was set on fire, along with her father, who died. A third woman told me how the Medhi army took her husband away, and two weeks later left his dismembered corpse on her doorstep.
The closer a human being comes to the horrors of senseless violence, the stronger those images become. We haven't brought Americans close enough to the flames of gun violence to feel the heat. We need to do that. My lessons as a volunteer in Jordan live with me to this day. I cannot read about the Ukraine war because the lessons I learned are still so vivid. I can only begin to imagine what it was like for you to be in that hell.
Doing refugee work creates a whole different kind of trauma. One that is often more abstract and second-hand, but nevertheless, deep and permanent.
I worked with the UNHCR in the Vietnamese refugee camps off the coast of Malaysia, and there the Vietnamese were those who had survived the tortures of re-education camps, their difficult escapes, and the attacks by (mostly Thai) pirates.
The deaths during their voyage came mostly from the opposing poles of dehydration and drowning. Some boats were rammed by the Malaysian Navy to deter them from reaching the shores. One man had lost his infant son and his wife. She had been raped and then decapitated. Another man lost his daughter because the boat was deliberately sunk too soon so it couldn't be dragged back out to sea by the Malaysian Navy. Many older people had their teeth pulled out for the gold. Multiply hearing stories like these for a year or two, day after day, and you can get a sense of the psychological effects on the refugee workers.
Yet, the stories were never enough to keep refugees from trying to escape an intolerable condition in their homeland. It's ironic, somewhat, how Vietnam has thrived so well economically during the past five decades. In part it's because all those refugees sent back hard-earned money from their new homelands so that their brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephews, and ... could be educated, become a professional class, start businesses, or rebuild their family farms.
Perhaps Iraq will see the same reinvigorated life in the next fifty years.
I don't think America fully understands that there was a civil war there between Sunni and Shia Iraqis between the years 2006-2008. That's how I learned what modern civil wars look like. It's a militia from one neighborhood going into the next neighborhood and rounding up a bunch of the military-aged males at night, torturing them, executing them, and then leaving their mutilated bodies in a ditch for their neighbors to find. Violence messaging. Bombing marketplaces to target the other side's innocent families. Mexican cartel war shit. All because we created a power vacuum after removing Saddam and dissolving the Iraqi military. We put thousands of young--mostly Sunni--military men into unemployment in an economy that just got destroyed while the insurgency was offering money to anyone willing to dig holes in the road and/or place explosive devices into said holes. Sometimes those bombs went off against Americans, sometimes they went off against the Iraqi police or politicians, and sometimes they went off against Shia civilians. It was a fucking mess there for at least two years, and that's before we start talking about ISIS and US troops killing people on the road in "escalation of force" incidents.
Americans all over the country have grandfathers who will not talk about world War II because of the horrors of war. Do those grandchildren ever really ponder that?
I do ponder it all. Not even my Grandfather in this case. My father -- half American, half European -- worked for the military in London during the blitz. He had tears in his eyes when he spoke of seeing a child's hand severed in death lying outside a bombed house. The rest of the stories he told me through the years are equally horrendous. I was in London on 9/11 with two small children. The news and images of New York were everywhere, and I could not protect them from seeing these images. They were really scared. My father told them he understood how bad Americans must feel about the loss of life and the two building, but he saw buildings blown up, and death in London night after night after night. They would be okay in the end, he reassured them. One had to carry on. From the stories both my parents told me I think not only are many Americans unaware, but they are spoilt in so many ways. Look at the 51% who now have a lack of willingness to sacrifice -- even a little -- for Ukraine.
I too had a wider view of things, and I found it very odd that the US turned everything upside down over 3000 dead on 9/11, while countries all over the world suffer much greater terrorist casualties on a regular basis. While 9/11 was unique in that planes were used as weapons, right-wing terrorists are the current scourge of the US in terms of the sheer number of incidents, but the right insists that the left is overwhelmingly behind US domestic terrorism.
"The minority that is rock solid for keeping things the way they are [is] clustered efficiently in certain voting districts that then put a lock into the legislative process. It’s not like they’re spread out throughout fifty states: This is a particular regional and political problem that then creates a structural lock on doing anything about it in the legislature. Everything comes back to minority rule." --Tom Nichols
Agree. Most people don’t know what the result of being shot with an AR15 or even a handgun looks like. They don’t understand what dying alone in an ICU looks like. It’s ugly. They don’t get what a trauma from crashing at 90+ MPH looks like. Really, they do not really even get what it’s like to live a full life and become elderly and frail and face death and the mental and physical toll that it takes on the person facing it. People and Americans especially are so insulated from the realities of illness, injury, trauma ,and death. Most certainly from political violence. Kind of crazy when you hear people wanting it all to crash and burn. We barely made it through a pandemic without losing our collective minds.
Total agreement, Travis. Charlie's examples from Vietnam add to the argument, and the events at My Lai. Your list could go on and on .... and then we have the photographs from Kent State that also shocked the country because the loss of young lives was now occurring on our own shores.
Your experience in Iraq reminds me much of Tim O'Brien's writing. He makes the point that the literature of trauma is so difficult to write, partly because the writer knows there will forever be that unbridgeable gap between those who have lived the experience and those who can only imagine it through the writing.
Words, like photographs, are all we have to try to tell the truth, however, to try to make the lives of others to come better than our own lives have been. If we suppress the words and photographs, how can we make those lives to come better?
I also send my thanks to Charlie for the detailed descriptions by surgeons who help us understand what the AR-15 does to the body. I doubt either those clinical words or actual photographs will influence the extreme right-wing who currently have a hold on our gun safety regulations, but perhaps my doubts will be proven wrong.
The Things We Carry stuck with me for a long time, particularly the chapter entitled "the lemon tree." It resembled a lot of what I'd end up seeing in IED blasts. That dude is a little bit of a personal hero of mine. Sebastian Junger as well.
I taught both authors' works to college students for many years, along with the works of August Wilson, Zora Neale Hurston (and other Harlem Renaissance writers), James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde .... and obviously the history of red lining, the Trumbull Park Homes (White) Race Riots, the Birmingham bombings, the Tulsa massacre and destruction.... never thought that literature and history would become suppressed and censored again. But here we are.
O'Brien's and Junger's works are still part of most college composition/literature anthologies, and hopefully they are making new readers and writers with a passion for getting to the truths of our lives.
Sorry and disgusted to hear about how the military treated your under-age drinking incident. Of course, it is not surprising.
100% we should be showing the graphic images. The only way you get people off of their asses to do something is if they are confronted with images so horrible that it just instantly registers with them that shit like this needs to stop. It repulses them into action. We should have done this with CV too. Show the anti-vaxxers graphic video of other anti-vaxxers dying of oxygen loss in hospitals while saying goodbye to confused families via Skype. Because the Trumpers never had this reality shoved into their faces, they could ignore the horror. If you start shoving pictures of dead kids whose leg muscles and arm muscles are sheered off from the bullets basically vaporizing the muscle off of their body, they won't be able to look at AR-15s the same way again. If they see enough mutilated bodies of children, it will burrow into their minds and they will see those images every time they look at an AR-15. You're basically planting flashbacks into their mind in order to get them to be repulsed by the same items they are trying to defend.
My own experience with graphic images of children and never being able to see certain objects the same way again:
In October of 2005, we were setting up security barriers for the constitutional election in Barwana, Iraq. The KBR trucks who hauled the concrete barriers out from their cushy FOB at Al Assad air base couldn't fit their trucks through the town's narrow streets, so we had to offload them outside of town and haul them in a few at a time with forklifts that had escort humvees attached as they made their trips back and forth from the KBR trucks to the voting center inside of town. Once we had been static outside of the town guarding the KBR trucks for about 15 minutes, kids started coming out to ask the KBR drivers for candy while we were sitting there. A few moments later, mortar fire started landing next to the KBR trucks. Two kids were vaporized instantly, with only shoes being left behind by one of them. The other two kids were riddled with shrapnel and expired before the casevac helos landed at our position about 40 minutes later. I learned the price of democracy that day--having just turned 19 the month before, but I also earned one of my first flashbacks that would follow me for life. I cannot see a child's shoes to this day without mentally drifting off into disassociation land and going back to that moment.
Point being: the imagery of dead kids tied to imagery of assault rifles is a powerful psychological deterrent, if we're willing to use it. The GOP will howl foul play, but they will understand that they will lose that fight against that kind of imagery and the emotion it invokes.
Agreed! We are far too comfortable in this nation, and it's time for those who are most comfortable (leaders in Washington!) to feel UNCOMFORTABLE. These are our children FFS. What does it say about America that we put fun and profit over our most precious and vulnerable? It's disgusting and shameful. :(
Travis, I am so, so sorry you have to live with that.
It's why I don't just think we should raise the age for buying rifles, we should raise the minimum age requirement for military service to 21 as well. The younger you are when you experience trauma like that, the more it sticks with you for life. Your brain is still developing in your late teen years. The pentagon just doesn't want to lose the opportunity to get dumb kids right out of high school to sign up under contracts they can't walk out of ("volunteer force" my ass). If they had to recruit from the 25+ crowd--or even the 21+ crowd, their recruiting numbers would plummet. So to keep recruiting levels manageable, they make the tradeoff of traumatizing contracted child soldiers for life instead of drafting the 25+ crowd. It makes no sense to me. They took my stripes away for underage drinking after my second combat tour right after we lost a guy. The way the military handles its personnel is a disgrace in comparison to what we give to them. At least there's the VA disability money I guess.
Agreed. I'd argue that because kids' brains are still developing, we should raise the age of consent for everything to 21: military service, drinking, driving, marriage, all of it. Set up a system of judges who can grant exceptions for all of that, such as emancipation from nasty parents.
Adults should run their lives as they see fit. Kids need more protection, as they're still learning the game of life.
The decision-making center, the pre-frontal cortex is not mature until about age 25. One of the worst things that happened to college-age kids is when universities did not have to answer to the parents anymore. It may have something to do with the explosion in student loans
Given that, one thing we could try is age-related permission for types of weapons:
--Raise the age for owning any gun to 21.
--At 21, you can own and operate only reduced-capacity weapons: revolvers or restricted-capacity pistols; pump shotguns; bolt-action or low-round semiautomatic rifles.
--At 25, when your brain is fully adult, you can own the rest.
--Create a national licensing system--safety, training, background checks, etc.--that allows underage citizens access to the full kit.
I would also raise the age for drinking, driving, and military service to 21, because of that brain-maturity science.
WRT Adulthood:
Most people are not adults until at least their mid twenties--this is due to a combination of actual physical development/maturation and simply having enough actual life experience.
The inexperienced and immature nature of youth is something that any military depends upon. You can get them to do stupid shit because they don't really realize it is stupid shit--it isn't fully REAL to them and their risk assessment is horrible.
I teach high school, I watch these people make bad decision after bad decision every day, multiple times a day.
100% You don't realize how close you were to death until well after service.
Ya, I always felt at least slightly shit upon (sometimes heavily shit upon) when I was in the service (1980-88)... and this was in the era before serving was "cool" and "popular."
I went into a public 'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, " We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, go away " ;
But it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, wait outside ";
But it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? "
But it's " Thin red line of 'eroes " when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's " Thin red line of 'eroes, " when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! "
But it's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An 'Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!
Kipling.
Kipling was a genius in many ways. This and his ode to dying on Afghanistan plains are masterpieces of how societies treat their war fighters.
On the other hand, soldiers have a well-earned reputation for causing trouble, even in peacetime deployments like right now in Okinawa. As long as they stay in the officers' club or the enlisted club, fine. But then when they go out "into the economy," they suddenly forget the manners their mothers taught them, even while doing mundane things like riding the bus.
That is largely because of a couple of factors:
1) The general youth of military personnel these days (and corresponding lack of maturity);
2) As has tended to be the case through most of history, many of these enlisted come from the lower strata of society;
3) It is a high stress job and it tends to lead to aberrant behavior (by civilian standards)--because, in the end, military culture is significantly different from civilian culture and the value systems and ethics are quite different. Being in the military is one of the more extreme versions of in and out group behavior.
During the Vietnam era draft, draft age was 18 but adult age for everything else was 21. People repeatedly lobbied to change the draft age to 21 on the grounds we should not be sending children to war. The appalling government response was to declare those children to be adults by changing adult age to 18 for almost everything (with a couple of exceptions that make no sense if the children really are adults).
The change has caused a number of knock-on problems which I won't go into now.
The military also took 17 year olds who were willing to go to Vietnam to avoid a jail sentence. I've heard stories of guys flying over there, then sitting on a Navy ship waiting to turn 18 when they would be deployed to an army unit.
I signed the contract at 17 in 2003 after doing a 2-stretch in juvi lol
Really appreciate your comments and candor on here over the while, Travis. Thanks for taking the time - I always learn something from your posts :thumbsup
I aim to please
Black lives didn't *really* matter to a whole lot of post-college white people until videos of police murdering them started filling up their Facebook feeds for example. Out of sight, out of mind folks. You give them the imagery and you force a choice on them. Vietnam ended partially because it was the first televised war where people back home could *see* the carnage they were sending their children to commit and they had to weigh the morality of the cause after seeing what was being done over there in the name of the "Domino Theory."
I spent several months in Jordan helping to provide emergency assistance to Iraqi refugees. The entire country was destroyed, and the Iraqis were, and are, deeply traumatized. I knew a man whose fingers and toes were slowly dissolved by acid, as a method of torture, and a woman who was set on fire, along with her father, who died. A third woman told me how the Medhi army took her husband away, and two weeks later left his dismembered corpse on her doorstep.
The closer a human being comes to the horrors of senseless violence, the stronger those images become. We haven't brought Americans close enough to the flames of gun violence to feel the heat. We need to do that. My lessons as a volunteer in Jordan live with me to this day. I cannot read about the Ukraine war because the lessons I learned are still so vivid. I can only begin to imagine what it was like for you to be in that hell.
Doing refugee work creates a whole different kind of trauma. One that is often more abstract and second-hand, but nevertheless, deep and permanent.
I worked with the UNHCR in the Vietnamese refugee camps off the coast of Malaysia, and there the Vietnamese were those who had survived the tortures of re-education camps, their difficult escapes, and the attacks by (mostly Thai) pirates.
The deaths during their voyage came mostly from the opposing poles of dehydration and drowning. Some boats were rammed by the Malaysian Navy to deter them from reaching the shores. One man had lost his infant son and his wife. She had been raped and then decapitated. Another man lost his daughter because the boat was deliberately sunk too soon so it couldn't be dragged back out to sea by the Malaysian Navy. Many older people had their teeth pulled out for the gold. Multiply hearing stories like these for a year or two, day after day, and you can get a sense of the psychological effects on the refugee workers.
Yet, the stories were never enough to keep refugees from trying to escape an intolerable condition in their homeland. It's ironic, somewhat, how Vietnam has thrived so well economically during the past five decades. In part it's because all those refugees sent back hard-earned money from their new homelands so that their brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephews, and ... could be educated, become a professional class, start businesses, or rebuild their family farms.
Perhaps Iraq will see the same reinvigorated life in the next fifty years.
I don't think America fully understands that there was a civil war there between Sunni and Shia Iraqis between the years 2006-2008. That's how I learned what modern civil wars look like. It's a militia from one neighborhood going into the next neighborhood and rounding up a bunch of the military-aged males at night, torturing them, executing them, and then leaving their mutilated bodies in a ditch for their neighbors to find. Violence messaging. Bombing marketplaces to target the other side's innocent families. Mexican cartel war shit. All because we created a power vacuum after removing Saddam and dissolving the Iraqi military. We put thousands of young--mostly Sunni--military men into unemployment in an economy that just got destroyed while the insurgency was offering money to anyone willing to dig holes in the road and/or place explosive devices into said holes. Sometimes those bombs went off against Americans, sometimes they went off against the Iraqi police or politicians, and sometimes they went off against Shia civilians. It was a fucking mess there for at least two years, and that's before we start talking about ISIS and US troops killing people on the road in "escalation of force" incidents.
Americans all over the country have grandfathers who will not talk about world War II because of the horrors of war. Do those grandchildren ever really ponder that?
I do ponder it all. Not even my Grandfather in this case. My father -- half American, half European -- worked for the military in London during the blitz. He had tears in his eyes when he spoke of seeing a child's hand severed in death lying outside a bombed house. The rest of the stories he told me through the years are equally horrendous. I was in London on 9/11 with two small children. The news and images of New York were everywhere, and I could not protect them from seeing these images. They were really scared. My father told them he understood how bad Americans must feel about the loss of life and the two building, but he saw buildings blown up, and death in London night after night after night. They would be okay in the end, he reassured them. One had to carry on. From the stories both my parents told me I think not only are many Americans unaware, but they are spoilt in so many ways. Look at the 51% who now have a lack of willingness to sacrifice -- even a little -- for Ukraine.
I too had a wider view of things, and I found it very odd that the US turned everything upside down over 3000 dead on 9/11, while countries all over the world suffer much greater terrorist casualties on a regular basis. While 9/11 was unique in that planes were used as weapons, right-wing terrorists are the current scourge of the US in terms of the sheer number of incidents, but the right insists that the left is overwhelmingly behind US domestic terrorism.
"The minority that is rock solid for keeping things the way they are [is] clustered efficiently in certain voting districts that then put a lock into the legislative process. It’s not like they’re spread out throughout fifty states: This is a particular regional and political problem that then creates a structural lock on doing anything about it in the legislature. Everything comes back to minority rule." --Tom Nichols
"I don't think America fully understands..." is the understatement of the century!
It drives me crazy when Americans talk casually about the US falling into a civil war because they have never seen what a real civil war is.
Hopefully your experiences are a lesson for us all!
Agree. Most people don’t know what the result of being shot with an AR15 or even a handgun looks like. They don’t understand what dying alone in an ICU looks like. It’s ugly. They don’t get what a trauma from crashing at 90+ MPH looks like. Really, they do not really even get what it’s like to live a full life and become elderly and frail and face death and the mental and physical toll that it takes on the person facing it. People and Americans especially are so insulated from the realities of illness, injury, trauma ,and death. Most certainly from political violence. Kind of crazy when you hear people wanting it all to crash and burn. We barely made it through a pandemic without losing our collective minds.
A lot of kids or peopke have a fetish with guns think that war is like playing video games, I bet.
The trauma is the same whether the violence is senseless or not. Acts of justifiable violence can be just as traumatic.
Thank you for your willingness to serve and aid those in need of assistance!
Total agreement, Travis. Charlie's examples from Vietnam add to the argument, and the events at My Lai. Your list could go on and on .... and then we have the photographs from Kent State that also shocked the country because the loss of young lives was now occurring on our own shores.
Your experience in Iraq reminds me much of Tim O'Brien's writing. He makes the point that the literature of trauma is so difficult to write, partly because the writer knows there will forever be that unbridgeable gap between those who have lived the experience and those who can only imagine it through the writing.
Words, like photographs, are all we have to try to tell the truth, however, to try to make the lives of others to come better than our own lives have been. If we suppress the words and photographs, how can we make those lives to come better?
I also send my thanks to Charlie for the detailed descriptions by surgeons who help us understand what the AR-15 does to the body. I doubt either those clinical words or actual photographs will influence the extreme right-wing who currently have a hold on our gun safety regulations, but perhaps my doubts will be proven wrong.
The Things We Carry stuck with me for a long time, particularly the chapter entitled "the lemon tree." It resembled a lot of what I'd end up seeing in IED blasts. That dude is a little bit of a personal hero of mine. Sebastian Junger as well.
I taught both authors' works to college students for many years, along with the works of August Wilson, Zora Neale Hurston (and other Harlem Renaissance writers), James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde .... and obviously the history of red lining, the Trumbull Park Homes (White) Race Riots, the Birmingham bombings, the Tulsa massacre and destruction.... never thought that literature and history would become suppressed and censored again. But here we are.
O'Brien's and Junger's works are still part of most college composition/literature anthologies, and hopefully they are making new readers and writers with a passion for getting to the truths of our lives.
Sorry and disgusted to hear about how the military treated your under-age drinking incident. Of course, it is not surprising.