Re: putting down the US military

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

It's easy to fault the military as an organization, as easy as
with any other. Most of us have had enough experience with
them to know what Dilbert knows, even if we can't quip like
the master.

What's hard is to know the unexplainable of combat and
be unable to convey what it's like to those who haven't
had the peculiar disorientation of losing whatever ability 
you've ever had to tell the difference between living and 
dying.

No book or film or general has ever got right, nor any tale told 
by skulled out vets sober or not.

What's never told is what it's like to lose control of mind and
body for days weeks and months. Maybe it can't be told, 
can't be remembered, can't be related in normal ways of 
communicating. Maybe that's why some of the best war
stuff is created by those who've never been there.

Enduring an artillery barrage is beyond comprehension, your
body goes to pieces under the crushing sound and concussion,
and involuntary reactions overwhelm the normal controls of all
organs and orifices. Every part goes haywire, beyond stopping,
everybody on the scene can't help becoming beaten meat
flopping and scrambling to get underground, trying to scream
amidst god's loudest roar of thunder and screeching richocheting
metal.

Bombing is far worse than that.

Even the hit of high speed round will hydraulic-ram your blood into
parts of your carcass it was never meant to go, and your senses
go numb with shock, and nothing works, body or mind. And that's
before you become conscious enough to see the savagery the 
slug's done to your precious gut, arm, leg, crotch -- if it didn't
fly through your helmet and skull leaving you permanently
satisfied.

There's no way to get ready for the worst you'll ever experience
and wish you hadn't. Maybe that's why most vets forget what
they actually experienced and fall back on the tired and true lies
of war stories. Nobody could possibly believe the other if you
could manage to tell the truth, which I doubt anybody's got the
courage to do, to relive that, when every instinct of survival 
is to go blank.

Which is why you'll see now and then some who just sit and stare 
a long way past the horizon, like math geniuses in Princeton deep
thought.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with recruiting and patriotism 
which are about wholly believable war stories like you see
on tv and hear down at the lodge and bar.