11 November 2004
tattoos
i'm a little disturbed after listening to NPR this morning. forum, a program out of the bay area, was talking about veterans and veterans affairs, etc. etc. fine and dandy. a lot about health issues, too, which makes sense, and of course the focus was on what will happen to veterans with budget cuts, what will happen to their widows, etc. again, nothing i haven't heard before.
then someone - and i didn't catch his function - started talking about what soldiers have been doing. in vietnam, supposedly, soldiers put dogtags into both shoes in case their limbs got severed from their bodies. so that their families could have as much of them back, or even just part of them back, as possible. that made me stop. as did what soldiers are doing now: tattooing name, social security number, blood type to their chest. as well as the line: insert tube here. if their lungs collapse, then medics have a better chance, are quicker, at inserting a tube to save them. it really made me shiver. can you imagine physically labeling your body parts, so that retrieval is easier in case they get severed from your body? these guys are just kids, damnit. think of the psychological impact of that.
i am so against war. maybe if it was a just war, or one that really had a just cause behind it, i wouldn't be a pacifist, i don't know. but this is just making me ill. and not just the heavily armored US soldiers (fine, so parents have been sending them armor, not that it is necessarily supplied by the government), but of course the hundreds upon thousands of civilians. and iraqi soldiers. it is just disgusting how whole generations of young men are being destroyed for the whimsy and the financial gain of a jingoistic megalomaniac.
*sighs*
on the california front, it is raining.
dandlioneyes at 9:54 am