America’s military, inured to inner-city fighting for at least two decades now, wouldn’t find it a difficult ‘reach’ to start shooting up downtown Philadelphia rather than downtown Baghdad. All it would take would be the ‘right kind’ of soldier (they already have them, in droves); the ‘right kind’ of officer (they have them, too), and the ‘right kind’ of circumstances (you can fill that in yourself).

The other dirty secret – that the ones who stick around derive pleasure from bloodletting and are responsible for some of the worst acts of domestic-violence and other violent acts – is also something which isn’t discussed, but for which the evidence abounds.

No; connecting the dots, it turns out, isn’t hard at all….

There are many psychological consequences involved with training minds to become killing machines. The experiences of hand to hand combat disturbed the emotional well-being of Vietnam war veterans for many years, even with the indoctrination of films and seminars designed to de-sensitize them. Among the more successfully indoctrinated, military men are right up there in the statistics of worst domestic violence offenders, along with police officers.

America has spent a great deal of money on dictators in foreign countries as part of the applauded platform for raising democratic awareness and Christian integrity. By carrying this agenda to the home front, we might find a great deal of young men and women faced with the moral trauma of other military personnel conscripted into the army to fight their own country. Nothing was really quite as pathetic in Central America as the soldiers who signed into the military because the pay gave them a secure position. They were often ordered to shoot at people who had once been their friends and neighbors. It doesn’t take very long in this type of setting for morale to drop very low and the most energetic forces to be the fanatical groups whose main pleasure seem to be in blood letting and not any particular conviction of right and wrong, and of the blatantly mercenary soldier. I don’t think America, which watches war through remote control, is prepared for any of this.

Connecting the dots isn’t hard.

That said, I’d love to see your side of things — just why are my conclusions ‘specious’, and why is this at all ‘funny’?

Kinda hard to do that when you are heavily outnumbered by the zealots…