"The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

Good-Hearted People

  I know that there are many good-hearted people in America who want to help veterans. However, what happens all too often is that instead of honoring our soldiers’ bravery and sacrifice, these good-hearted souls focus only on the wounds the troops bring home. Instead of treating soldiers as men and women who have offered the ultimate sacrifice, they treat them as victims of war wounds. The result of this misguided good intention is that veterans often feel weak for not being able to heal from their wound. They feel pathetic if unable to mend fast enough for their healers. The problem is that all these good-hearted people don’t want to match sacrifice for sacrifice. They don’t want to take responsibility for, pay for, create jobs for, and generate honor for the great sacrifices the veterans made in their honor. A soldier’s physical and psychological wounds should rightfully bleed all over society’s clothes until it wakes up to the denial of its sacred duty to bring home our wounded from all the battlefields, including the ones raging in some veterans minds.

Soldiers are young people whose natural instincts fit with the intensity of war. They are the ones who seek initiation into manhood and womanhood. The rest of us, the good-hearted ones, only want peace; and, since we cannot find it though our political system, we shut down, spend up, plug in and escape our own feelings in order to charge further into the forest of denial.

So it is in the hearts of the good-hearted public that the real war rages. When individuals have lost the ability to care for themselves, for their community and for their nation why should we expect them to care for their soldiers? If society were to stop and sit still, its guilt, shame, and most of all, its responsibility to humanity would catch up and depress it. Instead, however, it runs, spends, and finds a panoply of addictions to not have to face what it is doing or not doing for its military after soldiers have done their duty.

Soldiers in their distress from the natural fears of killing or being killed become victims not of the enemy but of their own society's neglect. If we use the analogy of the T cells in our bodies being the soldiers protecting us from germ cells, we quickly realize if we do not take care of these cells, we will die. This is also true for the social organism we call society. Instead of society caring for those who protect it, it dashes into the forest of denial leaving behind all understanding and hope to reclaim humanity. It’s time all good- people realize our military is society's T cells and we’d better start coughing up the bucks to pay for the care and healing that veterans need before our own teeth sink deeper into ourselves.

Larry Winters