The horror of war
What makes for a highly trained soldier commit an assassination on women and children sleeping while they are thinking they are protected because they are within walking distance of a US base with a mission of shielding those civilians from the barbaric Taliban? What do you think? I am sure there are many opinions.
First of all I don’t think there are any excuses for what happened, but there are reasons. Think of yourself stranded on a deserted island with a couple of friends. This island has large animals that come out at night to see if they can sneak up on you and eat you. You and your friends have to trade shifts trying to stay awake at night to make sure the animals don’t surprise you and get the upper hand. Day in and day out you fight to stay alive. There are some animals on the island that befriend you but there is a low trust factor because for any reason they could turn on you and try to kill you. Sooner or later, day after day of this, the three of you get tired, irritable, so you try to find some relief smoking something or drinking something to relieve the stress. this works for a while and then paranoia sets in and the three of you start mistrusting each other. They are in the middle of nowhere with no one to listen to their story or help them out, no way to get out. It happens one of them snaps and kills one of the others and the mental capacity is fight or flight but where are they going? So the horrors of war continue. How can an American soldier say something like: oh by the way I have had four tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan and I have had enough. How will they be perceived by their comrades? How will leadership treat them? Dishonorable discharge? How, what, when to do anything and the mind just goes berserk. This type of thing happens for whatever reason it happens — it is war.
There are solutions to protect our troops from too many combat tours, too many IED concussions, too little treatment, too little consideration for those who put their lives on the line. We must support our troops with prayer, we must pray for those innocents who died in this tragedy…