An appropriate article for Veterans Day

William Rivers Pitt writes about the Sacred Soldier at Truthout. He, too, questions how we deal with the voluntary Army. Some excerpts:

• After so very many years of condensed war –seven decades and counting since Pearl Harbor and the National Security Act, with the inevitable violent blowback hitting us where we live -- the United States has fully adopted the siege mentality necessary for the implementation of a permanent state of conflict. That mentality has poured out of the Pentagon and down onto Main Street everywhere, patrolled by armored police driving through communities of color with tanks and sporting military-grade weaponry that came to them at a steep discount from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The nightly footage from the local news and the international news looks more and more similar by the day.
• The fault lies with politicians who glorify and take advantage of the Sacred Soldier in equal measure, even as they slash funding for real soldiers who desperately need it. The trauma of multiple deployments, combined with the deliberate undermining of the national economy for the benefit of the wealthy, has made for a hard homecoming for many of those real soldiers. Their reward -- to be used as advertisements for the vast payday of permanent war whether they like it or not -- is beneath contempt, and profoundly dangerous.
• Many soldiers today do not even want you to thank them for their service. They wish simply to come home, to heal, and to find their parcel of normal after a season in Hell. This is the most reasonable expectation imaginable, and the fact that this country still struggles to fulfill even this small measure of solace tells you all you need to know about our national priorities. Any nation that does not care for its war veterans has no business making new ones.