Coming Home . . . To What, Exactly?

Private First Class Bowe Robert Bergdahl, United States Army. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The war in Afghanistan is winding down, so we're told.  President Barack Obama just announced again that major American combat operations will cease at the end of the year, and that a small number of forces would serve as advisers for a while longer.  We'll believe it when we see it.

Soldiers returning from war have been popping up everywhere, it seems, with impromptu reunions  upstaging graduations, sports events, local celebrations, and even the neighborhood barbeque.  We know this because cameras just happened to be at these events for no good reason, becoming a fixture on local news shows along with the latest stunt to raise "awareness" for some disease.

Along with all the manufactured giddiness that coming home entails, comes reminders of the costs of another bad war that had no bearing on national security.  Thousands of soldiers returned in body bags.  Thousands of others also returned with their limbs blown off and their minds ravaged by being in a constant state of deployment.

They didn't have to go to war, you know.  It's not like Vietnam, where your choice was to either fight there or flee to Canada if you couldn't get a deferment.  Instead, today's soldier chose to be one after witnessing the attacks on 9/11/2001, needed money to pay for college, or couldn't find a job back home.

Once you do go to war, you become so frustrated by what is going on around you that it makes you want to go nuts or go AWOL, or both.  An American soldier named Bowe Bergdahl apparently did just that.  He allegedly stepped off his military base in Afghanistan one day in 2009, then found himself as a guest of the Taliban for the next five years.  Bergdahl was recently released in a swap with five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay that the Obama administration engineered.

(Officially, the U.S. government says it does not negotiate with terrorists.  Unofficially, this probably happens more times than people think, so long as everything is kept on the QT, and no one needs to know about what we're really doing, right?  Because if you don't negotiate, people die.)

When you get home from the war, you can expect to get treated for your combat-related maladies at a VA hospital near you.  Wait times may vary, of course, just as in any civilian hospital depending on where you live.  If you happen to live in a politically-sensitive part of the country where veterans and seniors abound--let's say, Phoenix, and for some reason your VA hospital is the subject of a congressional investigation into why some people died while waiting to get taken care of.  This has resulted in Eric Shinseki resigning as secretary of Veterans Affairs,

If, however, your head is so messed up by so much combat that you start confusing your loved ones  with enemy combatants, or you start going all Rambo on your co-workers, that's another story.  PTSD is a serious problem, and the sooner it's diagnosed and treated, the better.  Also, keeping weapons away might also help.

Americans turn into flag-waving idiots when it comes to Our Soldiers.  Even though they haven't done a damn thing Over There except for exporting destruction, misery and hate, we are expected to kiss up to them as conquering heroes by those who don't know any better, or were blinded by conservative talk radio.  All those cute reunion videos won't mean a thing if we took a hard look at what kind of people they became while serving in the wars of the last decade.  And what they might do in the future not just to themselves, but to the rest of society.  This is what coming home is all about.