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Saturday, February 14, 2009 12:00 AM

Coming home: The conclusion

In the final article in Salon's series, we ask what President Obama will do about the rise of suicide and murder among U.S. soldiers returning from combat.

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  • Saturday, February 14, 2009 10:10 PM

    Modern day warfare, are we ready for it?

    Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and all the other psychological conditions that go with it, or come under it, seem to indicate that perhaps modern, well educated, humans are not quite suitable for war; especially the kind of war that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan or have fought in Vietnam. The point is we can train a person to use various weapons but we cannot train a person to deal with the sight of bloodied disfigured bodies. We can train a person to repeat certain procedures in certain situations but cannot train a person to react with indifference at the sight of a dying child who got hit in error.

    It is also very hard to train soldiers to handle the modern day insurgencies where you do not really know who your enemy is until you see one of your comrades falling to the ground. This kind of situation causes stress that could push a person to want to kill or die. I suggest that while we are trying to cure our war injured we should also try to rethink war itself.

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