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have an “array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive
jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards.” Even worse, many officers
later join the boards and executive suites of military contractors, where
they rake in millions making corporations such as Lockheed Martin,
Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman richer at
taxpayer expense, and sometimes promoting war itself on the network
news. Our military-industrial complex is as corrupt and rotten as any
institution of America’s broken democracy, and more deadly than most in
its consequences.
We need to end this war in Afghanistan and the other operations that
are making Americans less secure and recruiting new enemies daily. Then
we can focus on fixing our broken economy at home.
Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research. He is co-author, with Dean Baker,
of Social Security: the Phony Crisis.
This essay originally appeared in Stars and Stripes.
Is the Worst Yet to Come?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or “Moral Injury”?
by
Shepherd Bliss
“My God, what have we done?” combat soldiers sometimes gasp as
they see those they or comrades just killed, especially when they include
innocent children, women, and other civilians.
“We knew that we killed them/…the terrified mother/ clutching
terrified child,” writes former Lieutenant Michael Parmeley in his poem
“Meditation on Being a Baby Killer.” In l968, Lt. Parmeley led a combat
platoon in the American War on Vietnam. He receives benefits for what is
clinically described as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“My gunner…started to cry,” Parmeley writes. “There’s a myth of
recovery,/ that you put it behind you/…but memories aren’t like that/…I
know that we killed them.”
Parmeley and I have participated in the Veterans’ Writing Group for
twenty years. We attend regular meetings, break silences, tell our stories in