He's Been a Soldier for a Thousand Years

 
A good (if unfortunately routine) post by Daniel Larison today:

One of the more striking things about the paltry foreign policy debate in the 2016 campaign is that the war in Afghanistan was never mentioned in any of the presidential debates, and scarcely came up at any other time. As I recall, neither candidate said anything substantive about the longest foreign war in our history, and neither of them was ever asked to say anything. That was consistent with the overall neglect of our ongoing involvement in multiple foreign wars. The problem here isn’t just that both major party candidates would have taken conventionally hawkish positions in favor of continuing the war indefinitely, but that they didn’t think they had to take a public position because unending war is now simply our default mode of operation. Our political leaders and our media don’t just consider perpetual war to be tolerable, but for the most part seem to find it so unimportant as to not be worth their time. This is irresponsible neglect on their part, but almost no one notices their negligence because the immediate costs of the war are borne by a small number of Americans.

That last sentence I quoted may surprise a lot of people, and offend some. But it seems to me that those people who do bear the immediate costs of the war by serving in the military, are not interested in questioning it, even when the war is being waged by a president and a Congress they profess to hate. It's an article of faith that all our wars are defensive, that our military is fighting to defend our freedoms, and so on.  To deny that any given war should not be fought will be denounced angrily as lack of Support for Our Troops.  Those who have given their bodies and are ready to give their children's bodies as weapons to the war are just as dedicated to waging war forever as DC elites.

That's an oversimplification, of course, because many veterans do oppose American wars.  When I point this out to my militarist friends, they ignore it.  I haven't yet been able to get them to say something about the range of views among veterans, no doubt because it complicates their certainty that they, and only they, are Americans and speak for America.  Like many on the left, I've been accused of living in a bubble and not talking to those with different views.  That's not true for me, and not for many others.  The trouble is that those we talk to refuse to listen to different views; when they demand that their views be listened to, they mean that they will talk and others must listen.  No other views exist for them.  If you want to talk about people who live in bubbles or echo chambers, you're talking about the grassroots Right, Donald Trump's base.

Taking Responsibility for Your Memes

Great Cthulhu's Ghost, the Stupid is strong in this one.  It was as if a million brain cells cried out in terror and suddenly were silenced.

Begin with the meme itself.  Assume that Col. Ritchie is correct about the numbers; she seems to be.  That doesn't surprise me.  I've known about some suicides that involved alcohol and a gun, and it's true, it wasn't accidental.  The people involved were not regular drinkers.  They wanted to kill themselves, so they acquired a firearm, got drunk deliberately to lower their own inhibitions, and then shot themselves.   The way human-service professionals talked about these cases, it seemed that they believed that the suicide was caused by combining alcohol and a gun, like some kind of chemical reaction, and that's the vibe I get from this meme.

One of the suicides I know about was a conflicted gay man in his mid-twenties.  I don't agree with his decision, but it was influenced much more by having grown up in a ferociously antigay society than by the juxtaposition of alcohol and a shotgun.  He didn't get drunk one night, just happen to find a shotgun at hand (in his dorm room!) and spontaneously stick the barrel in his mouth; those who knew him said he'd been very unhappy for a long time.  Whether he sought other kinds of help I don't know, but I think he had, and they were not able to help him.

Col. Ritchie is evidently talking about suicides among combat veterans, where it should be even more obvious that it isn't only "two things" they "have in common" -- there's at least a third, namely the trauma caused by horrific experiences in combat.  It's a bit disingenuous for her to leave that one out, don't you think?

Now, this meme came into view through a couple of intermediaries.  At the first stage there was a page called Everytown for Gun Safety, who attached this information to the image:

Over the last decade, the U.S. military has endured an epidemic of suicides among active-duty troops, and more than two-thirds of these deaths involved firearms.

Military commanders determined that these suicides could be prevented by talking with soldiers about whether they had personal firearms in their homes and removing guns from those most likely to hurt themselves. Despite this, in 2010 NRA backed a law prohibiting commanders from asking at-risk soldiers even basic questions about service members’ privately owned guns.

Fortunately, the military fought back — and prevailed. Working with suicide prevention advocates and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group of retired generals and admirals lobbied Congress to remove the dangerous gag order, and it was rescinded in 2013.

Fair enough, and it's probably a good thing that the gag order was rescinded, though I wonder how effective the intervention really was.  I also remember a young man, a cousin of an old friend, who was nearly killed when his motorcycle went off the road into a barbed-wire fence, injuring and disfiguring him severely.  I don't know if alcohol was involved in that accident, but it definitely was some months after he'd 'recovered' from the first 'accident' and drove himself into a tree.  While I sympathize with the emotional pain that drove him to this extremity, my main reaction was: At least he didn't take anyone else with him.  It has long been suspected that many single-vehicle accidents are really suicides.  I wonder how many veterans, deprived of their guns, will find other ways to escape their combat-induced misery.  The reason why so many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are killing themselves is not that they own guns or are drinking; the third factor must not be ignored. And as with the young gay man who killed himself, I wonder how much can really be done for them, other than hoping the pain will diminish over time if they can be kept alive.

The second stage of transmission was through a page called Armed Democrats, who added this text above the meme:

Armed Democrats supports the 2nd amendment,
We also expect people to be responsible for their actions.

They aren't!

Hence, the need for regulation.

If you stupid son-of-a-bitches would stop shooting people,
including yourselves, we wouldn’t be talking about guns.

If you’re not stupid, you’re sick. The ACA covers that.
If you’re not sure what the ACA is, you must watch Fox.

The ACA covers that too. (same insurance plan)

It was this version that inspired the post I'm writing now.  Addressing miserable, traumatized combat veterans -- hurt in wars that the Armed Democrats may well have supported at the beginning -- as "stupid son-of-a-bitches" and adding, "If you're not stupid, you're sick" is bad politics, as well as inhumane, stupid, and vicious.  "The ACA covers that" -- meaning, the second time, watching Fox News -- boggles my mind.  The ACA isn't an "insurance plan" to start with, any more than it's "health care"; but that's the least of it.  Veterans shouldn't really need the ACA anyway, since as veterans they're entitled to various health benefits, though there are plenty of horror stories about the inadequacy of the services veterans have been able to get, thanks largely to budget cuts enacted by the people who sent them off to be chewed up in the first place.  But is there any effective treatment for PTSD?  The Veterans Administration says yes, but I'm skeptical. The mental health professions have been throwing drugs at their patients for the past thirty years, with inadequate results.  "Talk" therapy has fewer harmful side effects, but its effectiveness is also dubious. 

Telling a traumatized vet to see a shrink is just plain stupid.  Chances are he or she is already doing so, or trying to.  Armed Democrats are playing politics with other people's misery as surely as the Republicans, and with as little real concern for the problems of real people.

Doomed to Repeat It

What with one thing and another, I never got around to writing a blog post yesterday.  (I did, however, manage to finish reading Connie Willis's Lincoln's Dreams, which had been my priority for the day anyhow.)  It turned out to be just as well, though, because I picked up some more information this morning that came in handy.

President Obama gave a Memorial Day speech that added another dollop to my contempt for him.  Speaking at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, he addressed Vietnam War veterans (or maybe just the veterans in his head):

"You were often blamed for a war you didn't start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor," Obama told a crowd gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which lists names of those who died in the conflict.

"You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that's why here today we resolve that it will not happen again," he said to applause.

The president noted that many Vietnam War veterans have gone to airports to personally greet soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom joined the military in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks that triggered the now-unpopular wars.

According to the same Reuters story, he also "promised as commander-in-chief not to send U.S. troops back into harm's way without a clear mission and strategy."  What was our "mission and strategy" in Libya again?  What was our mission and strategy in Iraq?  In Afghanistan?  The US had a clear mission and strategy in Vietnam, as far as that goes: to stop the spread of World Communism by aiding a loyal ally in South Vietnam.  It was as transparently fake as our missions and strategies since then, of course, but we had one, and you work with the mission and strategy you have.  Considering that Obama continues to lie about what the US military is doing and why, I don't suppose he's breaking his perfect record this time.

But what jumped out at me from his remarks was the claim that returning Vietnam veterans "sometimes were denigrated", seconded by the article's writer, who said that many "of those who survived brutal fights in the Southeast Asian jungle faced derision when they got home in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of public opposition to that Cold War battle."  I didn't want to jump to any conclusions, but it sounded like Obama was repeating the false claim that the antiwar movement demonized Vietnam veterans, which in its purest form says that hippies spat on them.  There is no evidence that anything of the kind ever happened. The antiwar movement worked with soldiers and veterans, denigrating and deriding the politicians who had sent them to Southeast Asia to kill and die.  The group Vietnam Veterans Against the War soon emerged, and if anyone denigrated or attacked Vietnam veterans, it was the political establishment.  Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew fag-baited veterans who participated in demonstrations against the war, for example, and ultimately there emerged an official discourse of Vietnam veterans as unstable and dangerous.  It didn't help that the US economy was having trouble, and returning veterans had trouble finding or keeping jobs.  As VVAW member John Zutz wrote, "There is no place in the American memory for the factually accurate image of vets throwing their medals back at Congress."  Or at NATO.  And nobody who's anybody suggests that it was shameful and disgraceful to send American forces to destroy a country that hadn't attacked us in the first place.

Part of the elite contempt for Vietnam-era veterans was shown by the initial media and Beltway reaction to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall: they hated it, and there was even some attempt by the right to gin up some racist hysteria because the designer was (American-born!) Chinese.  Only when it became clear that the public liked it did the elites suddenly remember that they'd really recognized its greatness all along.  But if you want to talk about neglect of American veterans, consider Korean War veterans, who didn't get a memorial in Washington until 1995, although 36,000 died there (along with a million or more Koreans).  As with Vietnam, the willed amnesia came largely from the fact that the Korean War ended in a truce, not the glorious unconditional victory that Americans are promised by birthright.  (I mean, isn't it in the Constitution?  We always win?)  Returning Vietnam vets found that people -- not dirty hippies, but their school classmates -- just didn't want to hear about their experiences; it seems to have been even better for Korean War veterans.  I must have known some as a child in the 1950s, but I don't remember hearing anything about that war: it was World War II that was all over the place, as American interference in Vietnam gradually increased.

Still, I didn't want to accuse Obama of saying something he didn't mean, so it's a good thing I put off writing this post until today, when VastLeft linked to this takedown of The Audacity of Hope, which quotes Obama committing the lie to print on page 29: "the burning of flags and spitting on vets."  So he evidently believes it.  (An apologist could argue that in context, Obama was just describing the beliefs "white ethnic voters" to explain why they voted for Reagan, but his use of the trope this weekend shows that he believes it -- or else he was just pandering.)

The Reuters story kicks off with another piece of Obama propaganda, referring to his "own efforts to wind down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started by his predecessor, George W. Bush."  Korea and Vietnam may be ancient history, but Obama has only been in office for three and a half years.  It shouldn't be necessary to go to the archives to remember that Obama campaigned on his intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a promise he actually kept), or that Bush-Cheney had already begun winding down the war in Iraq with a negotiated Status Of Forces Agreement that Obama tried to ignore.  But he wasn't able to persuade the Iraqi government to cooperate, partly because of revelations by Wikileaks of US crimes which made the Iraqis unwilling to grant US troops legal immunity; so he had to wind down the US war (while still keeping thousands of regular forces and mercenaries in place).

Vast Left summed it up well, writing of Americans who served in Vietnam:

The horrors we subjected them to, and the ones we sent them to visit upon so many others, are not—or by gum should not be—something to celebrate.

Pity, learn from, heal from, yes. But to use the language of disgrace to describe some Americans' reticence to celebrate Vietnam troops as conquering heroes is a vulgar display of pandering for the head of a nation that remains ready, willing, and able to repeat the sins of that war as long as our empire has bullets, bombs, and Selective Service and military volunteers.