When "embedded" is too accurate a description

This past Christmas, I gave my older son, a Gulf veteran, a copy of "War is Boring," the graphic memoir about the compelling addiction of covering armed conflicts, done by war correspondent David Axe and cartoonist Matt Bors. He took a while to pick it up and then reported that, while he liked it very much, it was also painful to read.

David Axe is back with a comic called "Boom," on which he collaborated with cartoonist Ryan Alexander-Tanner, and this one isn't going to be easy reading for everybody, either, though it's only 15 pages and the entire thing is available on-line at Cartoon Movement.

Two of those links go to the same place, as does this one. I think it's worth emphasizing how important it is to read this short comic.

My son, as a veteran now working as a trauma nurse, turned me on to the problem of undiagnosed and untreated brain damage well before it was in the news. Now that it has become better known, we all talk about it, but the vast majority of us, I think, have yet to begin to face it and to start to calculate what it means to our society, our nation.

This is not an issue "for vets" because this is not the Roman Empire where all soldiers sign up for and serve 20 years and are a separate social entity. In our society, vets are people around us, living lives very like our own but who have a particular extraordinary experience. We can't wall off the ones whose experience creates issues, for humane reasons but also, if you can somehow do that, for economic reasons.

They are here, they are ours, they are us.

With every war, we increase our ability to bring home people who would have died on earlier battlefields. This lowers the body count, but increases the costs of war, in ways both measureable and immeasureable.

You might as well go ahead and read this, because, at this stage of the game, you can't always tell who to turn away from, even if it were your inclination.

 

Comments

[TWM]

"With every war, we increase our ability to bring home people who would have died on earlier battlefields. This lowers the body count, but increases the costs of war, in ways both measureable and immeasureable."

Well said. This is an issue that will be with us for a long, long time.