Thread: Who is protecting me?

To the jerk who said he was in Iraq, Afghanistan or on the border protecting my behind needs to know that I do not depend on him to protect me. Maybe he is protecting the Bushite and Evangicals who is against abortions but have no problem in sending our children to be killed in the Middle East.
I have been taught by my God;

Jer 10;23...It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.
Matt 10;28....do not become fearful of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul...be in fear of him that can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.
2 Chron 20;17....you will not need to fight...stand still ...see the salvation of Jehovah in your behalf...do not be afraid ....

Pro 20;22...do not say; “I will pay back evil” Hope in Jehovah and he will save you.
Psa. 146;3,4....Do not put you trust in nobles, nor in the son of earthling man, to whom no salvation belongs. His spirit goes out, he goes back to his ground; In that day his thoughts do perish.
Psa. 118;6-9....Jehovah is on my side; I shall not fear. What can earthling man do to me? It is better to take refuge in Jehovah, than to trust in earthling man.
Ex 20;13....you must not murder.
1 Pet 4;15..let none of you suffer as a murderer ...or as a busybody in other people’s matters.
(Middle East)
Rom 12;17-19...return evil for evil to no one...Do not avenge yourselves.. Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says Jehovah.

My people lost their lives but not their souls in consecration camps because they would not compromise their belief.
You are not my protector or my savior because you cannot do any thing to save my soul.

dyehard39, with all due respect here, these are not children, they are Men and Women and should be given the respect they deserve to be called grown up adults. These are men and women who have "voluntarilly" decided to join our armed services. Yes, they are someones children, not "ours" though.These adult men and women joined the armed services knowing they might be called upon to go to war, doesn't matter if we or they feel it is a justified war or not, they have been called to war for better or worse it is their duty, their obligation to do so whenever their country calls them to war. It would not matter if it was a so called justified war where everyone agreed, Americans would still weaken as we bagan losing them and want them home. We have lost the stomach for war, we no longer have the staying power it takes to win a war any war. We lost hundreds of thousands during WW1 and WW11, most of them didn't even get to come home, they stayed until it was over or they were wounded, the thing is we were not watching it 24/7 on tv, as we are now, that makes it a little harder. I don't know what is right to bring them home or stay and finish it, I do know, however, if we quit and come home, we need to be ready to face the conquences of our actions, these radical islamic jihadist will feel they have won, no matter what the reason we give for quitting and coming home, they will never give up until they have won our country. If we come home now, it will be taken as a sign of weakness to the whole world esp the islamic world and they will band together like we have never seen to perpetrate the most holy of jihads on America. I am telling you, if, we don't have the stomach to fight them there, we sure as hell are not going to have the stomach to win if they come here and start doing to us what they are doing to the Iraqis in Iraq. We had better be ready for that, because there is no such thing as cutting and running, so to speak, and it will be all over? No, it will only just be starting for us at that point! That is just my opinion, my gut feeling, and I will say no more about it, as this is not a political forum in that sense, it is just that everyone keeps talking about it, and it just goes against the grain for me to hear those brave men and women referred to as "children or kids", let's give them the respect they have earned, they are hard and seasoned Soldiers our Soldiers!

Some of them are 18-21 year old they are still children and cannot be taught to fight and kill people they do not know and have not done anything to them or their country. Iraq did not attack us on 9/11. They are fighting an un-necessary war and they know it. They cannot vote or buy a drink. They are kids.


If we are fighting terrorist in Iraq so we do not have to fight them here, it really means we have done nothing, after millions of dollars and 5 years to secure our homeland. Our borders are still open, our ports and air space is not secure and after 5 years we are still in an orange alert.
Bring our troops home, put them on the borders, ports and air space and them I will believe we are doing something to be safer and we are secure. Until them, demos or reps, you rhetoric goes in one ear and out the other of the American people.
My house is secure and save, not because I have gotten rid of the threats next door, but because I have made my house safer and I do not have to get rid of the threat. The threat still exist but I am not worried about it.
If Americans troops are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting terrorist so I can remain free and safe here, then I want to see each one of them when they come home in flag draped coffins.
My government who sent them there to die for me owes me that much.
It dishonors the troops and their families not to see them come home having given their lives for this country.
They do not lets us see them because of the effect it would have on us and our view of the war. We should and need to feel the effect. The families need to know how we feel. It is not real to us if we don’t see them.
I saw them come home in flag draped coffins from Vietnam. I saw the effect I had on their families and I need to grieve along with then because they gave their lies for me. The effects of war, we need to feel. War is ugly and war hurts and it is not always necessary. altho, they are alive, they are dead inside and it never goes away.


Vietnam War
1965-1975
President George Bush even proposed that we end it. His hope was for a “gentler, kinder America”. Further stating “this is a fact.” “The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory”.
The war was a profoundly negative experience for the American people. Pain, suffering and heartache prolonged agony of the war created for millions of American citizens.....more than 58,00americans died, hundreds of thousands were wounded.....20 percent suffered deep and persistent emotional distress and psychological trauma...twice the number of those who lost there lives have taken their own lives since returning home....huge number of America’s homeless are veterans of the war....2 million Indochinese lost their lives from 1961-1975....the more we learn about the war the heavier the burden becomes....the enduring agony of the war will not go away simple because the leadership of the nation recognizes that it has been with us for a long, long time, and continues to have a manifestly preoccupying effect on our sense of who we are and how we should be exercising our place and purpose in the world....why it was so persistently difficult to dispose of even after the military hostilities ceased and the troops returned home, and why it continues to stand as the most significant historical event for millions of human beings whose lives were shaped by it.....the Vietnam War remains an unfinished was....we continue to remain troubled by it.....
The essays is in four parts...
veterans testimony during and following the war....clinical descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder....”Why Men Love War” , how the human psyche responds to the excitement of prolonged high-risk adventure.....
the second part concentrate on policy issues, references to our nation life. Here we raise questions about lessons the were learned....
the third part reflect diversities of experience...the “dirty work” of the war was assigned to military units from minorities. Combat fatalities were much higher...some military units remained racially segregated...traditional native American mythology understand the becoming a warrior is a fundamental ingredient in the set of ritual acts by which one registers one’s claim to manhood..how are such claim to be registered when warriorship is being exercised on behalf of a white, Anglo population against a people with which the native American warriors feels some intrinsic and instinctive identification?”....native Americans wondered if the were fighting for the right side....
The fourth part focus on ritual act of healing...wars do not end until the warrior is able to embrace the enemy.
The Vietnam War was about American foreign policy and military strategy....
To Care Without Judging
Testimony of a Vietnam Veteran
It is virtually impossible to understand from the outside what veterans of the war experience.....a beast that did no good but much harm...many have a hard time shedding the role of scapegoat....a hard thing to talk or write about...feel experiences in Vietnam as an illicit affair, and that it too many be far to private to be sharing...didn’t want to go and was afraid...going into a hamlet, the Viet Cong had a recruiting drive the night before. They assembled the people in the center of the hamlet, where the head of the hamlet refused to help them. So the took his two daughters age six and eight, raped them, slit their throats, and threw their bodies into the well to pollute the drinking water. an interpreter from the South Vietnamese Army, with us became violently ill.”My two daughters are the same ages” he kept repeating it over and over....after an attack two North Vietnamese officers lay dead. The two American soldiers began taking souvenirs–....the two men put the bodies on the front carrier of our ACAV and drove through the column like deer hunters for everyone to see and take pictures, to pose by the trophies...fresh kill, General Westmoreland had been right, it raised the moral of the troops....the interpreter purposely told the Viet Cong where we were going, knowing that they would ambush us...the interpreter was turned over to the South Vietnamese, tortured and executed...the Viet Cong had kidnaped his two daughters and threatened to kill them unless the cooperated...it’s a story with no exit. You can’t know it without being in it and once you’re in it you can’t get out. Nothing that anyone did made any sense, unless you were they, and then it was the only thing there was to do.....They came home to a very poor GI Bill, to a radical campus with hatred for all veterans–“Babykillers” we were called.
There will be more wars, I hope it is popular war...but if it is not, it the country once more makes and ass of itself by invading, meddling, or trying to colonize, and it again needs a scapegoat to salve its own moral wounds, the collective scapegoat will probable be the soldier as it was after the Vietnam War.(Iraq?)....when these sacred moments happen in dark places and unpopular wars, the individual is imprisoned in a private story from which there may never by an exit...to under the experience of war you must be in war...it isn’t war the you understand, but merely the intellectual and esthetic concept of the idea of war, and that is not what veterans lived through at all.
That’s my message and my hope; that you will not try to understand, not try to assign moral values to the stories of individuals in Vietnam , not try to come to an attitude of certainty about the right and wrong of it all. Rather, if you would try to be with us at all, be with us in the chaos and let yourself become confused and disoriented, all awash with feelings, hurts and memories of both joys and regrets never be gone...then, perhaps, we can begin to come home again.
To Vietnam and Back
combat photographer who died at his own hands in 1987

For many of us the war continues and within the minds of people who continue to despise us.....we lost against a nation of rice farmers and fishermen....it is not possible to win a war of insurgency and guerrilla tactics, it the guerrillas are well armed. Devotion to a cause, whither it be religious, political, economic or philosophical, can and will defeat every obstacle placed in the way on the zealot. Hitler knew this. Ho Chi Minh knew this. The Ayatollah knew this.
There are no words to describe the physical and mental reflex action of combat...the fear, desire to live, horror, instinct, willingness to save a friend, ability to ignore the dead and relief when it is over...a GI who had his arm shattered lying on a stretcher with a smile on his face. He knew that for him the war was over... all that mattered to him was that he didn’t have to go back into the bush and he would be leaving Vietnam....even when they left the country, they took Vietnam home with the. In their minds they have continued to exist in the bush. Although they are physically on U.S. soil, the live in Vietnam . I carried approximately 50 pounds of gear all day....in and out of water all day....with leeches. For my party I drank a warm beer and shared a joint....during my entire year in Vietnam I had six hot showers that were fifty five gallons drums. The commode was half a fifty five gallon drum placed under a hole in a wooden plank. Every day someone was assigned to “shit duty.” this person poured kerosene on paper on the mess and set it afire. There was no privacy. To this day I can smell the burning shit. Vietnam was not knowing who you friend and enemy was. To this day I have prejudice. Beware of everything. Vietnamese bottle coke contain silvers of glass. Prostitutes had venereal disease or might attack you in you sleep. Children were thieves. Beware of everything except you own sanity, which, by now, didn’t exist.
Life in the U.S has been only slightly better than my life was in Vietnam...The day I arrived home a woman spit in my face. It is on my face today. Welcome home. She and thousands like her , misdirected their actions to the vets. We were mere pawns in a political and economic venture. Injury should have been directed towards corporate American and the government...there were hundreds of assaults on veterans. Welcome home was never stated to me for fifteen years.
The government and the citizens ignored the serviced of Vietnam vet. Memorials in Washington and Sacramento were constructed with funds donated bye Vietnam vets. Welcome home activities were sponsored by Vietnam Vets. Counseling services for Vietnam vets are provided by other vets. Vietnam vets have had to take care of themselves.
Being excessively ritualistic, each night I check the perimeter. I inspected all doors and windows...I rehearse what I will need in case of an emergency...it well help me survive...I had nightmares...wake up yelling....wake up crying...I don’t sleep well...I am afraid of guns.
Loud noises bother me, including music..leaves rustling in the wind get me out of bed to investigate.
My wife and I separated..I had eleven different residences in the first three years...three different jobs the first seven months.
Alcohol became my best friend..the drinking has caused some brain damage...I break down crying for no reason...I don’t like sitting with my back to windows..I keep the shades down....I could get into a fight at the drop of a name...Vietnam vets did not tell other people that they were Vietnam vets...I march off to the VA clinic for professional help..felt more like police interrogation than a counseling..a total lack of sensitivity...after fifteen minutes, diagnosed me as suffering from depression.
Too late for me...the Vietnam war had done something to me...aren’t we all Vietnam veterans..it will be up to the next generation to see that this nation get its act together...remember that there is a lot going on in our heads..do not pity us...all of us did what we felt was best for ourselves and for our nation.
The Vietnam Experience: Don’t mean Nothin’
former Augustinian monk and Army Chaplain in Vietnam .
The lost of faith is widely known....myth of war...we are God’s chosen people...America has a divine mandate to evangelize the world to its own political and economic systems. War is the sacred instrument...where by this mission is achieved.
President Reagan declared the Vietnam war a noble cause and the right wing has unleashed its fury against those who question the traditional mythology.
What was experienced was the harshness of war; brutality, death, and atrocity without a comprehensive rationale to “seal over” the reality....much of what the veterans has to say cannot even be articulated, much less understood.
The almost total inability both of veterans and of the American public to discuss Vietnam for so many years is a clear indication of defilement....this defilement as resulting from the breaking of two prerational taboos.(1) America is innocent (2) America is powerful.
America’s exercise of power is an innocent exercise of power necessary for our peace and prosperity.
Those on both sides of the Vietnam conflict were exposed to and participated in consciousness-altering, irreversible, massive evil. Atrocity, hatred, wholesale slaughter and barbarous acts of all kinds are the stuff of war. Neither they nor their county and its god were innocent...had the wages of sin been victory, a belief in our innocence could have been restored; but we were defeated...the illusion of power was shattered. The warrior, their nation and its god were shown to be powerless. We had sinned and the wages of sin was death.
The veterans who told me that 500 years of life would not be sufficient to atone for what he did in Vietnam .. ..for those he killed would still be dead. Only death will erase the emotional and spiritual scars inflicted upon the widows and orphans of his victims. “Where was God, that son-of-a-bitch, when the rounds were coming in at Khe Sanh?”
“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” “All that has happened to the veterans in Vietnam and since Vietnan—their broken lives, broken bodies, and shattered dreams—must placed in the hands of the Father.
Veterans seldom find help from the clergy. Most pastors do not articulate the Christian faith in these terms. A veteran has a better chance of finding a competent guide in a contemplative monk or nun...however lacking he or she may be in the experience of war or of ministry or of the world ---will be more able to relate to one who has undergone the shattering of culturally dominant images of God.
Living in Moral Pain
a writer

I began to talk to Vietnam veterans. I found a world of moral pain and seriousness that put to shame the way most Americans deal with their moral relations to the world around them.
A psychologist put it this way;”Day in and day out, we hear stories about atrocities and slaughter, things we didn’t hear before. Why men were silent before and now speak remains a mystery to me...sometimes you hear almost more than you can stand.

thread locked...
The War is Not Our Topic