Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, interviewed Tuesday by Jessica Desvarieux on the Real News Network, explains that stopping the United States’ “interminable war” is one important way to help “millions of Americans, who were sent off to do their nation’s business and who are now back seriously harmed, seriously injured psychologically and physically, sometimes both.”
Wilkerson, a College of William & Mary professor and a Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity academic board member, points to the trouble caused for veterans when they have fought for “a nation that is interminably at war, and arguably at war that many of these veterans don’t understand the purpose of.” Wilkerson elaborates:
They don’t understand what their sacrifice was for. The Iraq War comes to mind immediately as an illegal war, a war we should never have participated in. Many of these veterans feel that way about it. And this makes their healing burden, if you will, all the more challenging, makes the problem, the challenge that we have to welcome them home and to deal with their problems, their challenges, all that more difficult, because they don’t feel like the sacrifice that they made — in many cases catastrophic sacrifices — was for anything meaningful, for anything worthwhile. So we have to cure that problem too. The first thing, of course, we have to do is stop this business of interminable war.
Watch here the complete eight-minute interview in which Wilkerson also suggests other means to help US war veterans:
RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul wrote in June of 2013 about the physical and mental suffering of US veterans, noting in particular the high suicide rate and prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among veterans. Says Paul:
We should be saddened but not shocked when we see the broken men and women return from battles overseas. We should be angry with those who send them to suffer and die in unnecessary wars. We should be angry with those who send them to kill so many people overseas for no purpose whatsoever.
