I love finding new military blogs and just reading for an hour or two some nights when I can. Here’s a new one I found last night and read for a while, with the writing of a blogger named GI Kate – My American-Iraq Life. This post I’m highlighting here is a sharp meditation on something a fellow war veteran wrote to her…how it brings him to tears to see “you women coming back dead or all fucked up (unable to love, addicted to war, etc)”… to which she immediately ponders “what the fuck did that mean?”  Â
(Excerpts from ‘unable to love and addicted to war?‘)Â My friend and I spent a year in Iraq. While I was overseas, I saw nothing but sex. Sex between single soldiers, sex between soldiers who were married but on TYD (temporary year divorce), and females having sex with multiple people (before I have some stand-up male in the army jump down my throat, not all the males are appalling sex crazed scumbags…and the females aren’t all barracks whores). Maybe we were “unable to love” because love was made a mockery of. Love in the traditional sense did not exist…sex was the new love. There were no emotional strings attached…the wives and husbands back in the states were forgotten about…new love triangles began to form. Now there was war and sex.
…We were in a sea of people who were in relationships, who dragged their feet from day-to-day, who worked nine to five jobs…everyone was a blur. We seemed to move freely between them, attempting to just fall into place…there was no place for females like us. Everyday started out the same. We woke up to thoughts of Iraq, we wondered around hostile and resented everyone, we tried to mesh with our friends…we pretended to care about going out to bars and getting drunk and shopping…when the day came to an end, everything had been forgotten about…the jokes we laughed at, the people we interacted with…nothing registered. The only thoughts that made us feel alive, were the ones that were killing us…
yes