CSotD: Untold stories of recycled warriors
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There isn't a lot of wit in this Tony Auth cartoon, but there isn't a lot of need for wit on this topic.
To start with, most political cartoons use exaggeration to create that humorous irony and there's nothing left to exaggerate. The situation is already pushed so far to the extreme that you can't take it any farther.
The fellow accused of the civilian shootings had lost part of a foot and had a traumatic brain injury, and they deployed him yet again. What exaggeration could any cartoonist add to that?
And, in any case, irony and exaggeration are often misunderstood. Sometimes going straight up is the right choice.
So here are my disclaimers: Though not a vet myself, my son is a Gulf veteran and I come from a part of the country where joining up is a common part of growing up.
This cemetery isn't in my hometown, but it's from the same rural region. All those little red-orange dots are not flowers. They're Semper Fi flags. You might have to click on the picture to see what I mean, but they cover the area like the poppies on Flanders Field.
I was home last summer and had a conversation with a buddy from high school who had a tough landing when he came back from Vietnam. I don't know much about what he did over there, except that he was at Khe Sanh, which was no bed of roses.
I also know that naming battles or counting wounds is not how you assess the impact of combat on an individual. This does not stop me from suggesting that three deployments and twice-wounded adds up to "sit down, son."
Butch and I were talking about the repeated deployments, and he shook his head in frustration over what we are doing to our GIs. As tough as it was in Vietnam, he said, they knew when it was going to be over. They had a date, a contract, a deal, and as their hitch wound down, the short-timers would be assigned to safer duties so that they could wrap it up and get home.
And then home was home. Butch and Larry and Danny and Ray and Crandall and Kenny and the rest could deal with their experience however they needed to, but it was over and done and they wouldn't be sent back for second and third helpings.
Butch said a loud noise will still sometimes send him across the room, and his wife shook her head and looked down at her feet for a moment. He's been home for nearly 45 years.
And Butch didn't have it so bad. Kenny went the whole born-on-the-fourth-of-july route, riding with bikers and getting strung out on drugs and alcohol until he crashed and burned and had to put the pieces back together again. The pieces he could still find.
Butch and Kenny and I rode to school together every day senior year in Kenny's car. We'd stop at a diner for coffee and donuts, and we'd match coins. Odd man out had to buy. Butch was odd man out so rarely that his luck became a standing joke, that he only flipped his coin to determine whether it was my turn or Kenny's to pay.
Butch dated my sister for awhile. He was a good guy. He still is, though I only see him every couple of years, when I go back.
But I see Butch and Kenny every day, and so do you, and we don't even know it.
Butch was saying that it's not the basket cases, the extremes, that we need to worry about so much as the guys who need some counseling, some treatment, some help … the guys who startle, who lose their tempers, whose wives look down at their feet when the topic of the war is mentioned.
How many will there be, if we keep sending them back again and again and again?
The cost of that, he said, is going to be a lot more than the cost of the war itself.
About four years ago, when I was editing a small weekly, I got a call from a mother whose son was about to be redeployed. She was afraid — no, she was convinced — that, if they didn't honor his request for a medical discharge, he would kill himself.
He'd been a medic in a very active unit, and, when he came back, he had a lot of problems. His wife had divorced him but he'd run into a high school sweetheart who, with his mother, was standing by him. Still, there was little they could do other than make phone calls and write letters.
He was in Kansas, where his unit was preparing to go back. His roommates had interrupted him one day as he sat on the edge of his bunk with a pistol, occasionally lifting it to his mouth and then putting it back down again.
This was reported, but there were numbers that had to be achieved and recruitment was tough. Their superiors told them that guys who claimed PTSD were pussies and cowards who wouldn't stand up for their buddies.
His mother said that he and another guy from his unit went on temporary duty to another guard unit, and the guys there were horrified by them, saying that they needed to get help. The guys in this other unit couldn't believe anyone planned to send these two back.
But that other unit wasn't making the call. He went back to his own unit, and his own unit was sending him overseas.
She told me that she didn't want me to write anything yet, because he didn't want the publicity. She just wanted me to know, so that, if the intercession of some member of Congress couldn't help or didn't really happen, someone would be up to speed on the story.
We met a couple of times over the next few months, and finally she called to say that he wasn't going to have to go back.
But he didn't want me to write anything, because he felt he had let his buddies down, that he had let the team down, by not standing with them.
And so the story went untold, out of respect for his wishes.
How many other stories, I wonder, are going untold?
And I wonder how much it's going to look like this, when it's all 20 years behind us, the way it's 20 years behind them:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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