Don’t Marry A Soldier

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Don’t Marry A Soldier

typical US soldier in Iraq

1. Your loved one will be off for months and years at a time. He may be back only days before being shipped out again. This can be a pretty lonely life.
2. Unless he reaches high rank, he will never be able to provide for you and your family properly. Many soldiers’ wives live worse than those on welfare.
3. You may be transferred over and over. You have to pull up roots on a moments notice and move off somewhere else. You have no say in the matter. If you have children, they become army brats, children who never learn to socialise with other children since they are never in one place long enough to make lasting friends.
4. You will constantly dread that phone call or knock on the door to let you know your husband has been seriously injured or killed.

5. remains of a US soldier

   Your husband can be killed at any time. It is a sword of Damocles over your head for his entire career. He will leave you to care for your family as a single parent.
6. It is common for soldiers to suffer from PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He may panic at any loud sound. He may wake up in the night screaming. He may attack you imagining you are an enemy soldier. He may become paranoid. Make sure you learn what PTSD is before you presume love will automatically give you the resources to deal with it.
7. Soldiers often do some disreputable things under peer pressure that they avoid talking about. This is includes drinking to excess, whoring, drug-taking, raping, bullying and terrorising, hazing, killing and raping children and torturing. The fundamentalist Taliban had eliminated drug trafficking. Under US military control, Afghanistan has risen to #1 heroin producer in the world, selling over a trillion dollars worth a year. This could not happen if US soldiers were not complicit in the drug trade. Recall that a significant number of US soldiers returned from Viet Nam addicted to heroin. The remote control nature of much of modern warfare ensures the primary targets will be children and civilians. A soldier often does not even see his victims. When he kills blindly like this e.g. with napalm, cluster bombs, land mines or white phosphorus, in a third world country like Iraq where most of the people are under 15, inevitably he kills more children than adults, and civilians than soldiers. In addition when American soldiers attack they have a massive advantage in power, armaments and technology. This power corrupts them to toy with the civilian populations, to torment them for amusements like a child tormenting insects. The military likes remote control warfare because it keeps their soldiers safe, and it protects the soldiers from emotionally feeling the impact of their butchery. These soldiers look just like anyone else. You would never guess from the soldiers’ clean-cut faces what mischief they have been up to. Recall the pudgy boyish face of Lt. Calley of the Mai Lai massacre in Viet Nam. The domestic charms of house and home don’t quite do it for them anymore. These sadistic desires were always in the background. The thrill of violence was part of the appeal for them enlisting — to commit cruel acts without any possibility of legal repercussions. When you marry a soldier, you are marrying someone more prone to abusing you and your children too. His standards of what constitutes acceptable behaviour are warped by war experience.
8. A Canadian soldier returned from the relatively gentle Afghanistan war with PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He repeatedly abused his infant triplet sons, breaking 19 of their bones. He blamed the attacks on his condition. Do you really want someone with PTSD anywhere near your kids or near you? The New England Journal of Medicine reported that American soldiers returning from Iraq are being sent home to their families without treatment. According to MSNBC one in eight soldiers returning from Iraq are suffering from PTSD. Less than half seek treatment.

9. double amputee

   Your husband can suffer a brain injury or be made a paraplegic. This is 2 to 8 times as likely as death depending whom you ask. Professor Stiglitz of Columbia University said that as of 2006-01, there were more than 7000 servicemen with brain, spinal, amputation and other serious injuries, and about 20% of those injured have suffered major head or spinal injury. This turns him into a giant infant who has to be feed, bathed and diapers changed. You are morally stuck with caring for him 24/7 for the rest of your life whether you continue to love him or not.
10. When you rip off the pretty bunting, what the military is about is killing, torturing, maiming and terrorising people. In modern warfare, most of the victims are civilians and most of those are children. On some level, your husband was drawn to this killing. There is a cloak of respectability, even nobility that the government casts over it, but when you get down to it, soldiers do the exact same thing as Mafia hit men — kill just because they were ordered too. Though they give lip service to personal responsibility, they are brainwashed to the point disobeying an order becomes unthinkable. They consider deciding who has the right to live a superior’s total responsibility. At Nuremberg, humanity proclaimed that claiming “I was just following orders.” is not sufficient excuse for murder. Your potential husband, agrees with the Nazis. He thinks he is morally off the hook so long as someone else gave him permission to murder. How else could he make up excuses for killing civilians and children? Do you really want this man passing those sorts of dark genes to your offspring? Instead of spawning more little soldiers, you could just as well spawn more little criminals. What sort of woman are you to entrust your children alone with a child murderer?
11. You also might wonder about a man that selected an occupation that would keep him away from his wife most of the time, especially when he spends that time in the company of young fit men excluding the company of women. If he is a closeted homosexual or bisexual, getting married primarily to satisfy the demands of his parents and church, you are in for a life of misery. He will never be able to truly love you. He will never be true to you. Gay men used to sign on as sailors in the days of sailing ships, but would have a wife, in name only. Even straight men in prisons and in the military without access to women often resort to homosexual encounters.
12. Soldiers are often exposed to teratogens like DU, herbicides (like Viet Nam’s Agent Orange laced with dioxin), chemicals, chemical warfare, biological warfare, not to mention exotic parasites and tropical diseases. This may cause cancer later, or even more likely will cause your children and their children to be genetically deformed. Would you ever forgive yourself if your child was born hideously deformed, or even mildly damaged because of the damage these agents did to your husband’s sperm? Over half the soldiers who served in the Gulf War, died of Gulf War Syndrome or were treated for it. They were in Iraq for only weeks. Your husband will be there years. Not only the returning soldiers suffered from Gulf War syndrome, but also their children and wives. Soldiers brought back loathsome diseases, parasites, toxins and radioactivity. The military, in most cases, refused medical aid.
13. If you love and cherish your husband, you are encouraging and enabling him to do his job of soldiering. Soldiering is a sickening, revolting job, and it takes the memory of a loving wife for many to continue. You then became complicit is his war crimes. You are morally tarred with his misdeeds. Today, Canada and the USA only fight in illegal aggressive wars. They are not defending their countries as did soldiers in past. You are sacrificing yourself for goals as evil as any Nazi wife did, mostly killing civilians and children and teenagers who posed no threat to Canada, the USA or Britain.
14. If your soldier lover woos you, and holds out the promise of marriage, but never seems to pop the question, consider he may already have a wife back home, and he is just using you for sex.
15. Nazi soldiers were popular to start, but as their deeds became more and more widely known, all decent society shunned them. Soldiers who serve in illegal aggressive wars to plunder a small nation’s natural resources, such as the Afghan war or Iraq war, will over time become more and more pariahs, eventually subject to death threats and anonymous attacks, just as Nazis and Nazi collaborators were hounded. They could even face kidnapping and prosecution as international war criminals. The penalty for engaging in aggressive war at Nuremberg was death. Today it would be life imprisonment, an even crueller punishment. Consider how people who participated in the Viet Nam war have over the years become more and more pariahs. The shame of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be even greater because of the use of banned weapons and torture, and the craven motive for the war.
16. On 2007-10-15 a young woman told me she had gone to a bar and met a pleasant young man, who turned out be joining the military. The young woman recoiled, and asked “How will you feel when you are ordered to drop a bomb? You will be killing innocent people, perhaps a child. How will you feel about killing a child?” He responded, “It wouldn’t matter so long as it was a foreign child.” This is every soldier’s true answer. He could not kill children, a required side effect of modern warfare, if it weren’t. You don’t want that sort of man anywhere near your children.
17. What do you think of the wife of a serial killer, someone who murders dozens of innocent women and children? Someone like Karla Homolka. You feel revulsion. You wonder what sort of perverse motivation attracted her to such a killer. You wonder how she could bear to lie in bed next to such a creep. That is how many people will feel about you if you a marry a soldier, aka a hit man, a serial killer paid by the military to butcher and torture innocent people with illegal horror weapons such as napalm, cluster bombs, white phosphorus and land mines. To create shock & awe, they use weapons that kill as more painfully than any civilian serial killer would devise. Even after you come to your senses and divorce the creep, the shame will stick to you for the rest of your life.

18. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is illegal.
    ~ Kofi Annan (born: 1938-04-08 age: 71) Secretary General and Boutros Boutros-Ghali (born: 1922-11-14 age: 86) former Secretary General of the U.N.

    “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.
    ~ Richard Perle (born: 1941-09-16 age: 68), 2003-11-20, Pentagon hawk, cat-stroking, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, James Bond villain pasty lookalike, admitting the Iraq war is illegal.

    Since Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali of the U.N. have declared the Iraq invasion and occupation illegal, your husband will technically be an international war criminal. This means he may at any time be arrested if you leave the country to travel in a country that subscribes to the International Court in The Hague. The USA may not forever be powerful enough to protect him from prosecution, even on home soil. It is a hanging offence, though more likely it will e commuted to life imprisonment. Recall that some Nazis faced prosecution even into their 90s. That possibility will hang over you the rest of your life.
19. Many returning from Iraq become mental basket cases unable to deal with the horrors of war and the guilt at what they have done. They beat up their children and wives and are emotionally distant. Friends and family reject them. They can’t hold down a job. They become homeless. Look at the way American treats the homeless vets of the Viet Nam and Iraq wars begging on the streets. Watch some documentaries about the shell shocked vets. One grabbed a clerk by the throat when she did not hand over the change with sufficient respect. Others wake up screaming in the night decades later reliving trauma. Most have marital breakdown. The sound of packing bubbles popping sends a vet to the floor in cover. Another found he could not handle his job clearing up road kill since he could not shake his fear there were bombs hidden underneath the carcasses. You will become, at least to some extent, a nutcase. 28% of Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan are classified as having serious mental problems such as suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. The Veteran’s Association estimates 37% of American soldiers returning from Iraq are classified as having serious mental problems. Even the Bush administration admits 15% of soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). On 2007-11-11 CBC Newsworld Sunday Night aired a documentary called PTSD: The War at Home about Iraq vets suffering from PTSD who snap and kill their families and neighbours. According to the documentary, to get treatment for PTSD, there in a terrible catch 22, men must sign up for another potential tour of duty in Iraq. They can’t face that so they go untreated. According to CBC Newsworld documentary, aired 2007-11-13 16% of Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan have a dangerous drinking problem, e.g. drunk driving.

    I feel so ashamed of myself. It is even worse than when I was in Afghanistan. I have nightmares all the time. I feel so empty because I don’t know why I did what I did in Afghanistan.
    ~ Travis , Canadian soldier returning from Afghanistan.

20. There are many additional reasons not to marry a soldier, which are reasons why your husband should not enlist. Many of those penalties, you will feel too.
21. Perhaps your soldier boy has snowed you that he is a brave fighter for freedom, nobly protecting his country from the bad guys. This was true in WWII, but it certainly is not true today. First, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan attacked the USA, Britain or Canada. The Afghans and Iraqis have not killed a single civilian (unless you count mercenaries in Iraq) in a war that has waged longer than WW II. Bush claims that Saudis, not Iraqis or Afghans were behind 9/11. The USA attacked unprovoked. Even the WMDs turned out to be a lie. Aggressive war is illegal under international law. Under the Nuremberg principles, to aid or abet such a war is a capital offence.

    The war in Iraq was not about Saddam. Saddam was captured on 2003-12-13. The war did not pause for even a second. It could not have been primarily about Saddam. Further Saddam offered to surrender peacefully just before the invasion. Bush did not want Saddam. He wanted Iraq’s oil. Bush promised liberation, but instead bombed the residential sections of Baghdad in a Nazi-like show of Shock & Awe brutality on the opening day of the war. Decadent American cheered the spectacle live on CNN from their couches, much like Romans of old viewing a cruelty extranvaganza in the Coluseum.

    Bush has no interest in even worse dictators that Saddam such as Robert Mugabe and the generals who run Sudan. Those dictators don’t have the #2 oil reserves on the planet. Further, the USA installed a puppet dictator, an ex-Unocal man, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan whose Ministry of Vice enforces the same repressive shari’ia Islamic religious law as the Taliban. Clearly the Afghanistan war is not about freedom either.

    The notion the USA would spend $2 trillion for the freedom of Muslims is absurd, especially when Americans have a strong racist hatred of Muslims. On a per capita basis, USA is the stingiest of all the developed nations when it comes to foreign aid. Americans are not spending these stupendous sums on the wars out of the goodness of their hearts. It would be completely out of character. They are spending them to get control of trillions of dollars worth of oil. Your soldier boy is well aware of this, but he still likes to pretend he is seeking revenge for 9/11, or protecting the fatherland. He is just looking for an excuse to rape, maim, torture and kill. He is a sadistic serial killer. That is what truly motivates him. Listen in when he is drunk talking to his buddies about the real reasons he likes being a soldier. No matter how smooth-talking, handsome, fit and charming he is, you don’t want to get involved with a psychopath.

22. The problem with marrying a soldier is that his is already married to the military. You will always play second fiddle. He will always do what they want, not what you want. The military will decide what country you live in, whom you socialise with, when your husband will leave you and for how long. They will decide whom your husband will kill next, and what risks he will take. They will even decide what sort of haircut he has and how he wears his facial hair. They will decide where your kids go to school. They will decide your income. You are marrying a Momma’s boy who likes being told what to do, and by someone who is not you.
23. However, if you are foreign born, and just want to get a meal ticket to the US-economy gravy train, marrying a soldier might make sense. He will be away most of the time, so you won’t have to have much sex with him. There is a good chance he will get his head blown off by an IED or turned into a mental vegetable. You can then marry someone else, without all his drawbacks, while you are still young.

Today’s American soldiers are not draftees. Of all possible vocations, they chose killing, mostly civilians and of them mostly children. They are seriously sick individuals. If anything, America behaves worse than any other militaries, ignoring the Geneva conventions as “quaint”, using routine torture and banned weapons. It foolish national pride that leads Americans to claim their soldiers behave infinitely better than any other soldiers.

“One of the most bizarre excuses for the Iraq war that Americans give me is that they are defending their freedom from attack by Iraq. What attack? 9/11? Even president Bush on 2003-09-17, said that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush said bin Laden, a Saudi, and a small band of Saudi Al-Qaeda was responsible. Everyone saw the USA bomb the residential sections of Baghdad live on CNN on 2003-03-20, the opening day of the war, not the reverse. There was no WMD attack. There were not even any WMDs. Perhaps Americans are offended that Iraqis attacked them when the US military illegally invaded their country and started plundering it. That is defence, not attack. What American freedom did Iraqis interfere with — the American divine right to steal? The war was not even about liberating Iraqis from Saddam since Saddam offered to surrender before the war, and was deposed the instant the war started. If regime change were truly what the war were about, the war should have ended as soon as Saddam was captured on 2003-12-13 (5 years and 10 months ago). It raged on even more fiercely, without even a hiccup, indicating there was something else fueling it. Hint what does Iraq have billions of barrels of that the USA thinks it desperately needs, needs badly enough to kill and torture children for? War is about stealing other people’s resources. The rest is patriotic bullshit to sell them to gullible people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

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