Casualties of War, Part II: Warning Signs

Casualties of War, Part II: Warning Signs
Monday 27 July 2009

by: Dave Philipps Visit article original @ The Colorado Springs Gazette


After coming home from Iraq, 21-year-old medic Bruce Bastien was driving with his Army buddy Louis Bressler, 24, when they spotted a woman walking to work on a Colorado Springs street.

Bressler swerved and hit the woman with the car, according to police, then Bastien jumped out and stabbed her over and over.

It was October 2007. A fellow soldier, Kenneth Eastridge, 24, watched it all from the passenger seat.

At that moment, he said, it was clear that however messed up some of the soldiers in the unit had been after their first Iraq deployment, it was about to get much worse.
read more here
http://www.truthout.org/072809C

read more of this series here
Related Stories/Links

Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war comes home
EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution
Fort Carson report: Combat stress contributed to soldiers' crimes back home
Fort Carson report (.pdf document 126 pages)
Complete military coverage
Audio: Interview with Kenneth Eastridge
John Needham letter alleging war crimes

You are either thinking we have a serious problem or this is just media hype. If you think it's hype, your dead wrong and history proves that. It was easier to ignore all of the price paid by those we send when we were talking about Vietnam or any of the earlier wars in our history. The difference is the Internet. You can't hide much of it anymore.

While it was easier to hide the truth, it was a lot harder to deal with any of it even though it was all there. It was also much harder to live with feeling as if you no longer existed to the rest of the nation turned obliviously against you while you suffered in silence. You were no longer a soldier and thus obsolete. It was easy to ignore the suffering of so many so because it was easy to hide all of it from the attention of the general public.

You may be reading this and think "ok well there have been 1.7 million sent into Iraq and Afghanistan, so what's a few "criminals" to worry about?" The problem is, they were not criminals before they were sent into combat and the likelihood of them committing crimes had they not been deployed into combat, then not taken care of properly, the odds are against them ever committing crimes at all. So when you look at it that way, you finally understand that while they fulfilled their obligation to this nation as they are often reminded of the fact "they volunteered" you need to notice that we did not live up to our obligation to them any better than we did the generations before them. Not such a pretty picture to hold in your mind now is it?

The real issue we need to be discussing is the fact that none of the men or women in the military since the Vietnam war were drafted and forced to go. Think of what that requires of all of them. Think of what kind of person it takes to be willing to put their own lives on the line. Then think about what they go through. Wouldn't you expect them to change? Wouldn't you change?

If we helped them recover with the same kind of understanding we seem to have when we send them to risk their lives, I doubt there would be many suicides or crimes associated with deployment. The fault is not their's entirely. It is partly our's. Yes they decided to commit the crimes but we decided to ignore their problems in the first place.