Don't Take Your Guns to Town

The other day, while getting a coffee in Amarillo, I overheard a few men talking. It was the question of "freedom isn't free" as they were all Veterans of Foreign Wars, and they were talking about the issues of downsizing troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From their conversation, it became apparent that the were in their seventies and had rather a lot of combined military service amongst the three of them.

They were lamenting the fact that Americans don't understand the need to spill some blood to preserve our freedoms. Though it was not said directly, it reminded me of Rumsfeld's justification of Iraq in 2003, "You have to break some eggs to make an omelette." The coffee-house triumvirate definitely shared this sentiment and began to cite the staggering facts of the two World Wars, which are truly staggering. In short, it was that more men had died on any given day of significant military engagement than in all of the Middle East conflicts that we have been involved in.

That is truly mind-boggling when you think about it. It is also the sign of the technological times, beginning with the Vietnam conflict in that moving images and negative reports of the battle began to circulate back home.

The first course for which I was a teaching assistant was "Myths of War and Violence" with Tom Palaima, a MacArthur Fellow who teaches Classics and Plan II at The University of Texas at Austin. The course traced literatures of war and violence from Homer's Iliad to Tim O'Brien's fictional non-fictions of Vietnam.

On the reading list was the book, Bloods, by Wallace Terry, which was about the modern-day "Buffalo Soldiers" in Vietnam. For the most part, these African-American men were given the choice between prison or Vietnam. Without exception, most chose Vietnam. Many of them were sent directly to the jungle, gun in hand, with no preparation, then when their term was up, if they survived, they were dropped back on the streets of East L.A. or Kansas City, or the like.

Most of them ended up on the streets for good, or in prison, or in mental hospitals.

One of the books the students read for the course was Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam, written by a professional health physician and shows pretty conclusively that Achilles suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, exhibited by his "rage" and desecration of Hector's body, even to the abject disgust of all of the God in Olympus.

I was talking with my friend yesterday who had had a discussion with her daughters about some criticism they had heard about Obama's Health Care initiative. We discussed the differences between health care systems in the US and Europe, both regarding cost and availability. As a single mother with three kids, supporting herself, she has had to make some very difficult decisions regarding health care. Unlike living in Belgium or Italy, where I have benefited from the socialized medicine, she has much greater mountains to climb than me.

Her message to her children was that everybody's life is worthy of care from someone, whether they are homeless, mentally ill, or wealthy and white.

For the past few decades, a large percentage of America's homeless population was comprised of Vietnam and Gulf War veterans. While the three vets of the coffee shop say that we need to send more troops, we seldom say what we are going to do with those troops if they don't come home in a pine box. Usually, they are dropped off on the streets, trained to kill, and without mental decompression back into the "real world." A blind eye is turned more often than not.

One of the men in the impromptu military strategic planning group started talking about a town nearby Amarillo at one point and said, "it's one of those towns where you better take your gun with you when you go to Wal-Mart" and the conversation then turned to the problem of the "Browning of America" with minority populations on the rise, threatening the white population.

However, who is it that this veteran needs to protect himself against? Is it in fact the returned veteran of a more recent foreign war, not one of the "good wars" of old? Or, is it, when apprehended, a young Hispanic man that will be given the choice of "Prison or Afghanistan/Syria/Iraq...?" to ensure that our freedom isn't free?