Thank you all for your kind wishes. Last week was not pleasant. On the other side of the coin, I was alive and could feel the pain. For many like Roger Buss, they could feel nothing. They were still dead. That’s one of the effects of war. Even long after the war has ended, the casualties still exist.
There are those who bear no physical scars. Yet, some still die because of those emotional scars. Some clearly bear the signs of war. The government has assigned a percentage of disability for those. The list is long and complicated with so much for the loss of a limb or your sight and going on in endless detail. Of course, there are some physical disabilities you can’t see. I know of a man who jumped into a bunker at the beginning of an attack. He did not see the metal stake which castrated him.
There are other disabilities you cannot see. PTSD claimed somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 Vietnam veterans. Unlike earlier wars, we now recognize PTSD as a war injury. I could go on quoting well-known facts, but they are mostly devoid of emotional content. When we ask our men and women in uniform to go to war, we need to have clearly thought out the reason for that war. We also need to know that we will leave some of them physically and emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives. The question we need to ask is “Is this war worth its cost in human lives?”
