I was listening to this the other day while packing and it made me cry (as it always does). If anything could make me a pacifist, it would be this song: Don McLean’s the Grave

This line, particularly:

When the wars of our nation did beckon,
A man barely twenty did answer the calling.
Proud of the trust that he placed in our nation,
He’s gone,
But eternity knows him, and it knows what we’ve done

A while back, NPR had a series on PTSD and one of the people essentially said something along the lines of “When we [the People] ask of our soldiers the kinds of things they are asked to do in a war, we should expect that they come back fucked up.” Indeed, those who might come back from that without any remorse, or change, we would not want to give guns to in the first place. These are the kinds of people we want in a war:

And deep in the trench he waited for hours,
As he held to his rifle and prayed not to die.

And yet it is just these kinds of people it is the greatest crime to send into that fray.

Two of my sisters often have this argument: one (#2) refuses to let her children play with weapons (although one is taking fencing); the other (#4) has so many toy guns in the house it looks like a toy armory for when the toy zombies attack. “You need people like me,” #4 will say, “to protect you and your way of life.” “Without people like you,” comes the response, “weapons would not be necessary.”

Do we need soldiers for when we (even stupidly) go to war? Or should PTSD be something that we reserve for only the most important of goals?