Veteran Suicide, Illegal U.S. Wars, Restrepo, & Combat Obscura
Veteran suicides have remained consistent for the last decade. Roughly 6,000 veterans have taken their own lives every year for the last decade, a tally of 60,000 and counting. The decade’s total exceeds the total of U.S. service members killed in Vietnam (government archives estimate 58,220). Each annual report of veteran suicide informs the United States citizenry that almost as many soldiers die by suicide each year than those soldiers who were killed in action in the Afghanistan and Iraq military operations combined (near 7,000 U.S. service members not including the tens of thousands of US soldiers who were wounded in action).
A body here, a body there. That’s what this endless war on terror has boiled down to: Corrupt American elites breathing life into that famous Stalin quote. To paraphrase, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” To the Pentagon, the lives of our American service members are little more than a statistic. This political organization has run amok over the last two decades routinely deceiving the U.S. population. Apparently no one with power in the federal government will confront the nefarious forces within and connected to the five sided money pit of seemingly endless death and destruction that receives virtually no accountability.
My belief is that Wall Street is one of the most powerful forces keeping this shit show at the Pentagon together. For decades the wealthy, morally bankrupt elites of Princeton, Harvard, and Yale have feigned a moral aversion to war and military service by disallowing military recruiters to pull the little Richie Riches from their posh entitled existences to put their lives on the line for the nation that coddles their wealth.
No, no, no. The “anti-war” elites would prefer to make their war money from the safe spaces of Wall Street or behind the desks of monopolistic bomb, missile, and intelligence contractors. (Of course psychos like Pete Buttigieg and Tom Cotton took the Ivy-League-to-Soldier path, but they should not be viewed as figures to emulate. Both are profoundly cold, calculated, and deceitful).
In the same manner that the wealthy systematically avoid military service, the poor, working, and ravaged middle classes are systematically funneled into the military. If the Public Relations arms of the five sided war building don’t get the cash strapped demographics in high school, maybe they’ll get them in a reserve officer training program (ROTC) at their local community college or non-Ivy League university. After all, when your rich parents or trust fund can’t take care of tuition, a little help from Uncle Sam sure doesn’t hurt.
Here is what it boils down to, if you’re born rich, inherit money, or have financial means you never have to ask yourself this question: “Is college tuition worth killing or being killed?” I don’t know how long the Masters of War at the Pentagon expected this charade to continue. How long did they think they could use the U.S.’s economic divides to staff its military to continue to execute their never ending, under-reported, meandering War on Terror? It’s quite remarkable they’ve been able to keep it up this long.
Or is it? Not really. We live in a culture that has systematically glorified wars in films like the latest Rambo. There is no shortage of “toy” guns for little boys to aim at each other as they play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, or just play a cat and mouse game of “shooting” at each other for “fun”. There is no shortage of to-be-a-man-is-to-kill propaganda throughout American culture. By the time a young enlistee reaches adulthood, they’ve been shown over and over that to be a modern day Starship Trooper is just…well, normal.
It’s easy to sell war as brotherhood in this normalized culture. It’s easy to sell war as exciting in this normalized environment. It’s easy to solicit poor, working, and the decimated American middle class into military service with the promise of a $40,000 signing bonus and global travel. There is only one gaping problem: the magnanimous difference between the false narratives of war the Pentagon sells the civilian public to recruit soldiers and the reality of war as these enrollees will experience it. Nope, real war is not the handsome commercials that glamorize war, powerful advertisements that falsify patriotism,or recruiting tools that promise the stars or any of countless other Pentagon Produced Propaganda.
I am a veteran, and I’ve never met anyone from these fake war ads. Based on my noncombat (was on a ship in the Persian Gulf from 2006–07) experience and the testimony of virtually every combat veteran who has described their experiences in war, none come close reflecting anything like the ones depicted here. Most tales I’ve been told of combat more closely resemble those of Restrepo and Combat Obscura. And this all begs the question: If this much manipulation and deceit goes into maintaining these long, illegal wars, then what exactly is the point of them?
The way I see it is that we’ve gotten too many people getting duped into war, being broken by war, and ending their lives because of it. We’ve got a corrupt elite so detached they don’t care about the deceit sustaining the perpetual wars, the deaths during or after the wars, and they actively shield themselves from being targeted by the Pentagon’s Propaganda Ministry to serve in those wars. If I hadn’t lived this experience over the last two decades, I’d say it’s unbelievable. Hell, I havelived it and have a hard time believing the deep level of corruption at the core of this entire enterprise: rotten to the root.
