While I am a vet and I do think the military is necessary and that every man should be required to serve—not like this. This is a war so built up on lies that it boggles my mind that the public is still as silent as it is about it.

The media are stoking us up on these stories of American courage via wounded soldiers demanding to be returned to their units to continue the good fight and the govt being so touched that they grant them their wish—bless you boys . Those stories frighten me because the media are praising what is actually a psychological disorder that is not being treated!!!

Quite simply, an increasing number of our soldiers are becoming addicted to war. The adrenalin rush is a drug no different than any other except your brain is the dealer in this case. Once you get addicted to that rush, you have no other way to get it than to be in dangerous situations. The idea of just going home and taking it easy and sitting out the rest of the fight is unthinkable—you'd rather be dead. Indeed one man I read about had his ankle blown up but is still able to walk on it, has volunteered for a third tour and insists he will sign up for a fourth. Only then does he lament that he doesn't see his two young sons very much. I mean, my god, isn't it obvious the man has a severe psychological disorder induced by this war and that he desperately needs to go home and receive extensive counseling? Good lord, they sent him back to his unit!! You know they wouldn't have if they weren't so low on troops but right now they'll even take a disabled, mentally fucked up casualty instead of sending him home saying "you've done enough."

The point is, Bush did indeed claim this war will still be ongoing after he leaves office. By that time, how many Americans will we have sent? How many will come back addicted to war? What's going to happen when these people try returning to a peaceful, relatively nondescript lifestyle in middleclass America? They're going to go crazy. Just like those Nam vets who kept having flashbacks about being back in Saigon (the body is so badly withdrawing from lack of chemical rush that it recreates the locale in the mind in an attempt to induce the rush again) are going to be replaced by thousands and thousands who return to Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Georgia, wherever and still think they are in Baghdad or Fallujah or Sadr City.

And judging from these atrocity incidents that keep surfacing (and about which the public is very silent) we're due to see some brutality and crime break out when enough of these troops come home and have had a few years to let their juices stew over everything they saw and did. If you're 20 years old and never saw a dead body before and you watch a fellow soldier rape a girl and shoot her in the head and kill her family because they were witnesses, what is that going to do to your head ten years down the road when you have a family of your own and you have never received an ounce of counseling?

One thing about a draft is that it makes people go who don't want to go and who don't want to be soldiers. They're not ever likely to enjoy the situations they are in. When you have a volunteer army, you have people who DO want to go and who DO want to be soldiers and you're much more likely to have cases of killing and torturing innocent people from the overzealous righteousness of their cause. And you're putting them in a situation where an Iraqi dignitary has to have a 12-vehicle heavily armed escort simply to cross the street (no exaggeration according to a Newsweek reporter currently there). I mean, DANGEROUS! And we're dropping them in this hellhole a mandatory 2 or 3 times and allowing them to volunteer for as many tours as they want!! Good god, the horrible psychoses we are going to start seeing in our midst a few years down the road.