The Breaking of a Marine

by ilona
Sun Aug 20, 2006 at 06:34:22 AM EST
ePluribus Media Post

I learned early that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers - historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state...War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And this is why for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over. - Chris Hedges, veteran war correspondent and author of War Is a Force That Give Us Meaning

We're fighting them over there they tell us.
We sent our nation's finest young men and women over there, so we won't have to fight them over here. They promise us nothing will touch us. As if we can be insulated from war and everything that flows from it. As if our troops will come back undamaged and whole after their third, fourth, fifth deployments to hell and back.
They lied. The war has reached our shores.
The vessels of war are those service men and women who return to us broken, beaten, and hypervigilent. Sooner or later, even the best and brightest if pushed long and hard enough arrive at their breaking point.

SNIP You Can Read Rest HERE or at above link.

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Ilona, and the group at ePluribus,{alot of their work is listed under the PTSD Header at the right, along with a link to ilona's PTSD Blog} have been Incredible Advocates on Getting The PTSD Message to the Public, Which Should Have Been There All Along!! They are also focusing on the DU Contamination our Ordinance Unleases. She has a Book coming out, sometime around September, on the Research, Subject Of and Debilitating Consequences of what War does to the Human Mind, i.e. PTSD, Watch For It!! {I'll be passing the information on as soon as she lets me know it's in Publication.}

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And This:

Iraq war first hard look at women's level of combat post-traumatic stress disorder

- Donna St. George, Washington Post
Sunday, August 20, 2006

(08-20) 04:00 PDT Washington -- There are times when Trinette Johnson's life seems to stall, when she finds herself staring at the ceiling fan in her bedroom, watching the blades spin, her mind hung on nothing -- not her receptionist job, not her fiance, not her ailing father or her four children.

Not even the war.

The war, of course, is always there, she said, an unseen force in her life, sometimes producing moments of blank detachment, sometimes stirring up anger like nothing she has ever known.

SNIP Read Rest HERE

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And over at Rocketboom vlog Paul Reickhoff of IAVA gives a stellar interview on the Contractor Issue in Iraq