Combat to Criminal? How they got to that point is the question

Ever think about how in control soldiers have to be to be in the military in the first place? Think about it. All the training they have to do topped off with following orders telling them what to do, when to eat, when to wake up and when to go to sleep. They spend years of being in control.

We are always told the military is addressing their need to heal, but over and over again, we discover far too many times the military used the wrong address.

Suicides have gone up since the military started to "do something" about them. Suicides back home have gone up as well with more and more veterans facing off with law enforcement, usually when they have reached the point where suicide seems to be the only option they can see.

Communities wonder what justice really is but it wouldn't have to come to that point had they wondered first how they ended up that way after all they did for us.

These folks are not your average citizen. They were willing to die for someone else. So why do some go from that, surviving combat, years of honorable service, to being treated like a criminal?

What is not being done? What is being done needs to be changed, but when do they do it? When will they ever reach the point where the "one too many suicide" really happens and they actually do something about it instead of repeating what already failed them?

Criminal or victim?
Communities weigh how to deal with battle-scarred soldiers who do wrong after coming home
Washington Post
Greg Jaffe
September 20, 2014

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - Staff Sgt. Robert D. Carlson raised the gun to his head. In the parking lot of their duplex, his wife was calling the police.

"Please help," she cried. "He punched me in the face."

His intention, Carlson would say later, was to kill himself. Instead, alone on the second floor of their house, he lowered the gun from his head, pointed it toward a window and squeezed the trigger again and again, nine times in all.

Some of the rounds went into the roof of a garage, just below the window. Two rounds hit apartment buildings across the street. One round flew into the headlamp of a responding police SUV.

That was July 2012. Now, two years later, after being found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to eight years in prison, Carlson wonders about the fairness of such a punishment. "I know I did wrong," he said recently from the detention facility at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. But is jail time appropriate for someone who, before he fired those shots, spent 16 months in Iraq, followed by 12 months in Iraq, followed by another 12 months in Afghanistan?

Forty months total at war: He had survived a blast from a suicide car bomb. He had killed an Iraqi insurgent as the man's children watched in horror. He had traded places one day with a fellow soldier who then was killed by a sniper's bullet, standing in the very place where Carlson would have been if he hadn't switched. Did his years in combat mean he was deserving of compassion?

Compassion or conviction - that's the choice more and more communities across the country are facing as the effects of 12 years of war are increasingly seeping into the American legal system.
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