Here s what I got from this article, which was long as shit. The sorileds are bored. The enemy is nowhere obvious. The soldier death tolls are running high. The officials and higher-ups are either clueless to the morale problems, don t give a shit about the morale problems, aren t doing anything about the morale problems, or DO see them and DO care but condone the killings because they feel the despair of low morale and inefficiency and helplessness themselves. It s a tough situation it s too easy to sit here, thousands of miles from the Middle East with no military experience and no fucking idea of what these guys go through and feel and see on a day-to-day basis and call the killings horrendous atrocities, gruesome, cruel, unforgivable. All I can do is imagine that something is going on here that I m unaware of. I m not saying the murders are okay. I m saying that war is a force that I have never been up close with, but I know it s powerful and I know it s unique in the way that it changes people the way they think, the way they feel, the way they react. When the enemy is invisible and strikes chiefly with IEDs, which are as unpredictable as they are devastating, what the hell do you do? When you re walking around in the middle of a desert in heavy gear carrying heavy guns, your loved ones are thousands of miles away, knowing that the next step you take or the next road you drive down could end your life, and that there s absolutely nothing NOTHING concrete that you can do about it, what do you do? Where does that pent-up frustration, fear, and anger go? What s the outlet? How do you cultivate a desire to protect the civilians around you, when you have no choice but to wonder whether the people you re protecting wouldn t hesitate to kill you and your entire brigade if they had half a chance? How do you keep remembering what you re even fighting for, especially when there s nothing and no one tangible that you can fight against? How do you keep yourself from hating everything and everyone you see in the strange land that surrounds you? And finally, how do you react when you get caught? How do you deal with the fact that you enlisted in an organization to protect your loved ones and fight for your country, only to be put in situations where even sensible, rational human beings would go crazy with the stress, helplessness, hopelessness, and frustration of losing fellow sorileds and not being able to do anything? How would you react when a couple desperate attempts to deal with your situation landed you a life sentence in prison and hateful disrespect for the rest of your life? It doesn t make sense to me. The gruesome killings don t make sense. But the war doesn t either. I can t possibly fathom any of it. To me, these killings are just as much a representation of the awful, twisted, fucked-up-ness that is war as it is a show of baseless, abject cruelty.
