“Where are your legs which used to run,
When you were forced to carry a gun?
Indeed, your dancin’ days are done.
Johnny, I hardly knew ye….”
I was
returning from one of many business trips last week, and I saw a fellow in the
Portland airport, obviously Coming Home.
He was in a uniform – I didn’t look to see which branch; it
didn’t matter; I was more interested in the people who were there to meet
him.
He looked confused – two years in a foreign country where killing people is a participatory sport will do
that to a person; if the stats are right, he’s also suffering from depression
and PTSD. He carried a duffel bag which
didn’t quite dwarf him, but came close; he'd obviously been and done the things he was ordered to do, and while he didn’t look to be old enough to have been and
done all that, there he was, and the few who were there to meet him at
10:00PM on a random Tuesday were doing their best to make him feel welcome.
There was Grandma, who (like Grandmas everywhere) stood
there, teary-eyed, while Mom hugged and hugged and cried; a younger sister
stood and hugged her teddy-bear, waiting for her turn at her brother. Dad was absent; I speculated that he was likely working a
double-shift at the big-box store where he was forced to get a job after losing
his contracting business. The only thing
left for the boy to do after all that was to join the military (he probably felt lucky to get a
slot in the Air Force; most of those enlisted positions are ‘in the rear with
the gear.’)
He’s coming home to a loving family. While that’s a start, he’s also coming home
to a lot more.
In the time he’s been gone, his government has been
busy.
The Pentagon, home to those who oversaw his
all-expenses-paid trip to exotic lands, has been busy covering up the fact that
now more soldiers die of suicide than combat (this is due to a lot of factors
well beyond the purview of this piece, but it’s obvious that the people we send
out aren’t the same ones we get back – and a lot of the time, they don’t do too
well when they’re deployed, either.)
I don’t quite know how anyone is going to explain this to
him – if they’ve got the sense to do so, that is – but the Constitution he
swore to defend against all enemies (foreign and domestic) has been knocked
into a cocked-hat, and the very government he swore to defend has turned out to be the biggest enemy of
all.
It’s holding one of his own in detention (1,000 days this
week) without trial for, in essence, telling the unvarnished truth, and backing
it up with documented evidence.
It’s demolished the Bill of Rights, thanks to the
sitting-president’s signature on two successive copies of the National Defense
Authorization Act. (Now, thanks to this,
anyone who steps too far out of line by way of protest can be chucked into one
of the nation’s ‘detention centers’).
Maybe that confused look on his face, as well as the tan,
was due to his having been stationed not overseas, but at Nellis Air Force Base
in Nevada (where the operators of drone-aircraft over Afghanistan refer to
their civilian casualties as ‘bugsplats’.)
Too much forced-immorality will lead to confusion as well as depression –
regardless of where you get ‘em, morals have a habit of catching up with you.
As I walked past, I noted the family – the young soldier
hefted his duffel, and they began a walk back to the car.
If he can put all of this behind him – enroll in college;
say – and actually begin life over again, he’ll be one of the lucky ones. Half of the nation’s veterans are homeless;
by appearances he had a home waiting, and people who cared for him, which is a
start.
What he’ll do now that there are cameras everywhere, drones
in domestic skies and laws on the books to sort him out for good and all if he
starts talking too much or joins a veteran’s protest group is quite beyond
me. Thanks to the government’s sequester, the hot shower and warm bed which awaited him at home will be there for even fewer people as this year goes on, and perhaps even the young veteran in the airport will find himself another victim of his government's malignant inaction.
It’s a bleak America to which this young fellow returns, and
the stakes are damned high if we want to get it back.
Until then – and at this point, it’d a damned near-run
thing, as Wellington said – the only thing the boy in the uniform is going to
learn with any certainty is that – in spite of the expense of blood and
treasure – the terrorists won.
Not long ago, I read an article by a young lady who thought
it was ‘unfair’ that so many people were generally down on the Obama
administration – her logic was that now, at least no new prisoners were being sent to Guantanamo; he did give us that health-care thingy, and besides – only the ‘bad
guys’ need to worry about that other stuff.
News: Ten bucks off
my blood-pressure medication isn’t a fair trade for the First and Fourth Amendments. Sorry.
That ‘other stuff’ is the reason why America exists. Take it away, and we’re another tin-pot
dictatorship.
The boy looked back at
the airport concourse just before stepping on the escalator for the parking
garage; the look in his eyes was one of hope as well as confusion, a ‘so-this-is-home’
Thousand Yard Stare.
I hope he makes
it. I hope we all do.
