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Date Posted: Fri, May 20 2005, 16:56:59
Author: Larry Lusk
Author Host/IP: 66.214.115.70
Subject: Re: No Dead Heroes
In reply to: Alexa Godfrey 's message, "No Dead Heroes" on Fri, May 20 2005, 11:10:20

Bob is right about the mental and emotional wounds. Some of these type of wounds never heal and are in some ways more crippling than physical wounds. My right hand hasn’t worked the way it should or did before a hunk of metal tore through it thirty-seven years and two days ago. I’ve adjusted to that slight disability and the pain I still feel if I twist it the wrong way and that my right thumb has almost no feeling in it. But when I drop something or feel the pain it touches a deeper hurt inside me. It reminds me of that horrible few minutes when I watched my best friend die and could do nothing to save him. It reminds me of how much I miss him and I wonder again what he was thinking as he lay there dying looking up at me. I got a Purple Heart for my physical wounds but for many of those thirty-seven years all too often all I get for my emotional pain is “hey, get over it, it happened over half your life ago. You must be just a weak person or just enjoy making your life miserable”. This is just one of many mental wounds I still have, far more of them than scars on my body.

Why does the Military not award these mental wounds with a medal or any other type of real recognition? It’s a simple answer. If people in general knew the real cost of war; the thousands of men and now women who will go through their lives at times wishing they had died on the battlefield rather than lived to come home, then it would be very hard to recruit new soldiers. Plus it would cost the American taxpayer more money to compensate veterans for the disabilities they really have. If you hide the real price then you can go on making wars and con the young men and women to fight them for you. What good is a collage education if you spend much of your time in mental anguish? How many vets will actually be able to go back to or finish school and get that big benefit the recruiting officer conned them with to sign their life away? Tell them the truth and you can’t fight your wars.

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