When everybody was going, “Bring the soldiers back home! Withdraw the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq,” I was saying, “No, don’t. Just don’t. If you don’t have the money to rehabilitate them, you can’t just bring them back and let them deal with the trauma on their own.”
I predicted this was going to happen back in 2008. People are not toys. You can’t move them around like pieces of a puzzle and not expect them to react in any way.
Chalmers Johnson said this several years ago in conjunction with his writings on “blowback”.
Actually, I think he didn’t mind the idea of letting these people stay in such places as Afghanistan so they could fully “go native” — I think he preferred the idea of some war-damaged Marine becoming a local warlord to his becoming a monster on the prowl in a place such as Dearborn …
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Soldiers are shaman figures because they often suffer great trauma if they persist in their profession and they face death. They get insights into things that most people, within the bubble of consciousness known as civilization, do not experience — the darker side of humanity. Also they must learn to think like a lizard, to turn on their lizard brain to give them ultra-sensitive infra-red vision into subtle shifts in the environment and its mood. They have to go through a training process where they gain tolerance for their own adrenaline, so that it does not become a potent force of disintegration from within but can be turned against the enemy. Of cvourse not everybody makes it through the difficult shamanic crossing — and ultimately nobody does. Soldiers often herald the way and cross sooner than the rest of us.
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America does have the money to rehabilitate its soldiers. It just chooses not to spend it on that. And if this bloke had gone nuts and killed someone else’s family in another country, mainstream American media wouldn’t have even covered the story. 😦
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I’m sure the money could be found but nobody is choosing even to rehabilitate soldiers with loss of limb. The unseen psychological damage gets no attention. And here is the result.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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