This is what I’m reading right now: “Chasing Ghosts: a soldier’s fight for america from baghdad to washington“.  The author is a veteran of the current Iraq war & talks about the kind of crap he went through.  First thing that stuck out for me was that his group started their mission on the same day that Bush pulled that “mission accomplished” publicity stunt, talk about irony…

While reading it, I find myself constantly in amazement at how we as a culture expect to reintegrate into civilian life people who’ve been in combat like that.  The descriptions of how war changed him & his peers, both out of obvious necessity & as reaction to inevitable cultural clash, alternate between sad to almost tragi-comic in a way.  It kinda makes me wonder if maybe civilization had a better idea back when warriors were bred from birth rather than picked from the masses.  Not saying “let’s go back to that”, nor that it’d be possible to, but sometimes you wonder…