Disabled Veterans Shatter The Myths Of American Warfare

I completely agree with the thesis of this report. Although I quote part of it here, I urge you to read the entire thing:

The true economic and social costs of American wars are beyond calculation. Take, for example, the way cumulative wars have increased the inequalities of American life. War profiteers — arms manufacturers, military contractors, corrupt officials — are largely responsible for the widening economic chasm between their class and the cannon fodder, yet powerful veterans’ organizations have won special privileges, including higher education (the GI Bill) and preferential employment for unscathed as well as disabled vets. With the military racially segregated until 1948, however, and the country still plagued by racism today, the result has been, in Kinder’s strong words, “affirmative action — a chance to spend millions of dollars, millions of hours, and millions of words to shore up the social and economic privileges of white men” at the expense of racial minorities, suspected homosexuals, and women of all colors — the wives and mothers who remain to this day the principal providers of disabled veterans’ long-term care.

World War II produced mushroom clouds and 60 million dead worldwide, yet morphed in America into the Good War of the Greatest Generation, a mythic reconstruction of remembrance that eclipsed the real experience of veterans. (More than half a million were hospitalized for psychiatric care.) Selective memory also helped the nation to forget the next war, Korea, and accept official promises that modern high-tech “humanitarian interventions” and preemptive strikes to “spread democracy” would be both short and good.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/15/disabled-veterans-and-the-myth-of-american-warfare/

My health was permanently altered by my military service, but I have never asked for a dime in return. I didn't deserve anything. However, the men and women whose minds and bodies have been shattered by war deserve a lot more than we have given to them.

Ultimately, our debt to them can only be repaid by stopping this madness we call war, kinetic action, overseas contingency operations, or whatever bullshit name we give it to mask what is really going on - genocide of the brave and the just for the benefit of the cowardly and the greedy.