Casualties of War: Military Veterans Have Become America’s Walking Wounded

Come you masters of war / You that build the big guns

You that build the death planes / You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls / You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know / I can see through your masks….

You fasten all the triggers / For the others to fire

Then you sit back and watch / When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion / While the young people’s blood

Flows out of their bodies / And is buried in the mud.

— Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”

War drives the American police state.

The military-industrial complex is the world’s largest employer.

War sustains our way of life while killing us at the same time. As Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and author Chris Hedges observes:

War is like a poison. And just as a cancer patient must at times ingest a poison to fight off a disease, so there are times in a society when we must ingest the poison of war to survive. But what we must understand is that just as the disease can kill us, so can the poison. If we don’t understand what war is, how it…