The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A seperate investiagtion into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.
Relevant and heartbreaking. The closest thing I have to knowing what any of this feels like is from watching the movie Dead Presidents.
The artist’s name is “Dorthy”. You can check out more pics of the exhibit on her website – HERE
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6 responses to “Green Army Men – Casualties Of War”
“three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined”
California Veterans. California. They died after returning home because Cali is a god awful place to live lol
Pity the man who lives to tell the tale of war. For it’s a scarring one, one that usually leaves men deeply shaken, if not injured or handicapped.
Sounds like Leftist propaganda to me. You look at statistics from the whole of armed service members, not just this one unit, and you’ll find that crime rates are dramatically LOWER than the US Average, and it’s been that way for YEARS.
Here’s another thing: Domestic Violence. You know how easy it is to get a domestic violence charge? Having a yelling match with your old lady can get you a domestic violence charge if SHE throw something at YOU. As for being an actual wife beater, you either are one, or you aren’t. Being in the Military doesn’t change that. I had three men in my family who served in WWII, two grandfathers and a step grandfather, Army, Navy, Marines. One of them never went into combat, and he’s the one who was a wife beater.The other two would have kicked his ass had then known him.
We had two guys in my unit who were involved in drunk driving fatalities when we got back from Iraq and got a SIXTY DAY LEAVE. Both of them were hit and killed by drunk drivers, but that’s not what the Colorado Spring Propaganda Gazette would infer to you. I call bullshit on the whole piece.
That unit had a lot of problems. Most of the guys that got into trouble when they got back home had already been in trouble before they manged to join the Army. Where the hell were the Junior Officers? I would have had them all doing training. Men need structure. Young single GIs lose their minds without it.
Are they re-cycling the same old Vietnam vets stories now? They were BS then and I have no doubt that there is the same amount of truth in these.
I don’t know how people can deny our troops are having trouble coping with coming back to civilian life. I have friends that never saw action that can’t get used to living in an unorganized environment like civilian life. I could not think what it be like to see and do the things they do and have to come home. Pats on the back and being called a hero are good, but when the civilian populace ignore the horrors of war and the horrors that vets live with, they become alienated and quite possibly disillusioned.
Trotsky armed all available workers, men and women, ordering the transfer of military forces from Moscow. Within a few weeks the Red Army defending Petrograd had tripled in size and outnumbered Yudenich three to one. At this point Yudenich, short of supplies, decided to call off the siege of the city and withdrew, repeatedly asking permission to withdraw his army across the border to Estonia. However, units retreating across the border were disarmed and interned by order of the Estonian government, which had entered into peace negotiations with the Soviet Government on 16 September and had been informed by the Soviet authorities of their 6 November decision that, should the White Army be allowed to retreat into Estonia, it would be pursued across the border by the Reds.