The military is something that never made any sense to me. I was never able to see any sensible reason for it.
My dad spent time in uniform after being drafted during WWII. He never made much sense of it. We were all tremendously lucky that as an IT guy of the time, typewriter mechanic, he escaped combat activity. He felt that being drafted screwed his life pattern up, and the promise that the military would take care of folks upon return was never fulfilled. Given his experience, I could never figure out why vets over the last thirty years complained bitterly over government ill treatment in regards pensions and support. You don’t have to look very deep to grasp that this has always been the case.
This fellow seems to have needed the experience of time in the American military to figure all this out, including the fact that his country is a rather mean place.
An addendum to this article. Too bad the writer didn’t see this book before enlisting.
Wounding the World.
While one has to have sympathy for the trauma that war can inflict on soldier and civilian, Blackman’s casual disregard of the Geneva conventions is a case in point. As are the atrocities inflicted at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. Both events were revealed to the wider world by the camera – the unflinching chronicler of the most brutal aspects of militarisation.
Interesting insight, in my view. I have long thought that the camera is one of an array of “inventions” — I use scare quotes because the word itself attempts to hide the demons the act is meant to expose — that catalogue our failures. That it is in the teleology of the instrument to do so is the source of much conflict as is revealed in the “exposés” mentioned above. We do what we can to both perceive and deny our perceptions of what the camera reveals about us. We accept both the chronic compulsion to use the tool to reveal ourselves and the simultaneous urge to hide from it. A recipe for disaster. When what is revealed is challenging to hide, and the attempt at disguising falls short, there is significant trauma leading to all forms of violence and harm, some of it self-inflicted.