The Pentagon treats its soldiers like dogs - dead and alive
Well, here’s a bit of light relief news from the war front - sort of:
The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of American service members killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at a Delaware facility that also cremates pets, a practice that ended yesterday when the Pentagon banned the arrangement. The facility, located in an industrial park near Dover Air Force Base, has cremated about 200 service members, manager David A. Bose estimated last night.
Pentagon officials said they do not think that human remains and animal remains were ever commingled at the facility. “We have absolutely no evidence whatsoever at this point that any human remains were at all ever mistreated,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said at a news conference hastily convened last night.
Obviously, you can understand the Pentagon’s panic attack over this. After all the other bad news stories they were not exactly looking forward to headlines like ‘Army treats soldiers like dogs’.
It is kind of funny though that they get so nervous about the way they treat dead soldiers. If I were a soldier I wouldn’t give a damn what they did with my remains in case I got killed but I would like to be sure that my bosses, be they generals or presidents, would choose their wars wisely - and that I wouldn’t get sent to fight and maybe die in a war that was senseless, immoral, quite possibly illegal and counter-productive as well.
It would also be nice if those same bosses would care as much about what happened to me when I was alive as when I was dead. Personally, I wouldn’t give a damn if my ashes would be mingled with that of some Trigger or Lassie, as long as I could be sure that the army had done all it could to protect my living body while I was fighting their wars. Some armour on army vehicles at the start of the Iraq war would have been quite welcome, for instance.
Furthermore, they could bury me in any pet cemetery they chose, as long as they treated my wounded body with at least the same care as most people would have for their pets. It’s not particularly good for your morale to know at the start of your working day that at the end of it you could be sent to some Godforsaken Hell hole of a place called Walter Reed Army Medical Center - which would make a much scarier horror movie than another ‘Pet Sematary’ flick.
In other worse, it would be nice if the Pentagon cared for the people fighting and dying in their wars a bit more than they seem to do about their own image.
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