Good excuses for bad behavior...not!

I keep getting pounded, verbally, by my ex-husband about the bad behavior of some of our soldiers overseas. He seems to think that it's perfectly fine to do whatever they want to because of the enormous
pressure they're under and that they should be allowed to "blow off steam" any way they see fit. 
Well, yet another bad soldier has shown up, and this time, he slaughtered 16 innocents in Afghanistan, presumably because basically he was under SO much pressure at home due to, get this, financial matters, for the most part. Well buddy, guess what? Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (you can read the article at the bottom, if you really want to) was not forced to do FOUR tours of duty OR commit this act. I really sort of have a problem with men signing up for so many tours during this sort of thing. I think maybe there is more than patriotism at work here. AND I think we'd cut WAY down on PTSD victims if we would start limiting tours in wartime arenas to one or two only. Being a career soldier is one thing, being a career killer is another. YES, I know there are many times when killing is unavoidable in war, that's why it's called war, but killing an oncoming enemy in a "it's either him/them or me" sort of situation, and the wholesale slaughter of innocents are two different things, aren't they??
They don't even know if he's suffering from PTSD or not, but if he is, I think he should become the poster boy for limited time at war. We've had enough embarrassment from our boys, haven't we? We just had that group that had their little "pee party" on dead bodies, when is enough enough??
And don't think I'm saying that PTSD isn't real, because I happen to know first hand that it is. I have suffered from PTSD since before they even called it that, or used it for anyone other than soldiers. It used to be called "shell shocked" in the stone age. I had a severe trauma at 17 when I was sexually assaulted by someone I trusted and I have lived with it for 43 years now, and I have yet to murder or pee on anyone. It is one thing to have something traumatic happen to you far away from everything you know, and another to have it happen in your back yard, almost literally. If I had been assaulted overseas, I could at least have the security of knowing that I NEVER had to go back to wherever again, and that I was somewhere at least safer, and that makes MY PTSD, at least in MY head, a lot harder to deal with than this Bales guy. He VOLUNTEERED to continue going over there. That's like me going back to my rapist's home over and over again, isn't it??
And think about this. These soldiers are supposedly acting so badly because of all the horrible things they see. Well, I watched a movie today that make me think. This movie was about a heinous series of murders and the detectives trying to find the perpetrator. Real cops, every day, see all sorts of horrors doing their jobs. So do doctors, ambulance personnel, ER personnel, prison guards, social workers, CPS workers...hell, even Humane Society workers see things too gruesome to forget, ever. Do we give everyone that is traumatized a free pass to act out any way they want to? I could have easily just told my brother what
had been done to me, where the guy worked and the rest would have been "handled", but I didn't. I lived with being so stupid for putting myself in the position to be date raped all this time, telling myself that he didn't take anything away from me because I didn't give it to him to take. I was robbed in the worst way possible. Did it scar me? Yes, and I still carry that scar. Should I have been allowed to cut off his penis or have him beaten half to death? No. There are rules that civilized people live by. Back then, there was no such thing as date rape. If a guy you knew did something to you, well, you asked for it. Had it happened after date rape was established as a crime, I would have gone straight to the police. But my hands were tied, so I lived with it and have managed to be human ever since. Soldiers DO go through a lot in war, but these days especially, they go willingly, often multiple times and if they sign up to play the game, shouldn't they be accountable to the rules? There ARE rules, and WE expect everyone else to play by them, don't we? The Geneva Convention? We hunt down war criminals, don't we?? We still hunt Nazi's, for heaven's sake, and they're ancient.
Don't let another guy get away with an atrocity because he played too long and had "personal problems", please.
Just shaking my head and sayin'
Dragonfly 
See below

He is accused of the kind of crime that makes people shiver, the killing of families in their own homes under cover of night, the butchery of defenseless children. Under normal circumstances, Americans would dismiss such an act as worthy of only one response: swift and merciless punishment.
Not so in the case of Robert Bales — at least, not for some Americans.
So far, many seem willing to believe that a 10-year U.S. military veteran, worn down by four tours of combat and perhaps suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, simply snapped. That somehow there must be, if not an excuse, at least an explanation.
Exactly what set off the Army sergeant accused of massacring 16 civilians in Afghanistan's Kandahar Province is far from clear. But already, organizations and individuals with differing agendas have portrayed Bales as the personification of something that is profoundly broken, and have seized on his case to question the war itself or to argue that the American government is asking too much of its warriors.
On the website of Iraq Veterans Against the War, organizer Aaron Hughes declared that Afghan war veterans "believe that this incident is not a case of one 'bad apple' but the effect of a continued U.S. military policy of drone strikes, night raids, and helicopter attacks where Afghan civilians pay the price." Those veterans, he wrote, "hope that the Kandahar massacre will be a turning point" in the war.
"Send a letter to the editor of your local paper condemning the massacre and calling for an end to our occupation in Afghanistan," Hughes wrote.
On March 11, authorities say, Bales, a 38-year-old married father of two from Washington state, stalked through two villages, gunned down civilians and attempted to burn some of the bodies. The dead included nine children.

In Lake Tapps, Wash., neighbors knew Bales as a patriot, a friendly guy who loved his wife and kids, and a man who never complained about the sacrifices his country repeatedly asked of him. They find it hard to believe he could be capable of such depravity.
"I kind of sympathize for him, being gone, being sent over there four times," said Beau Britt, who lives across the street. "I can understand he's probably quite wracked mentally, so I just hope that things are justified in court. I hope it goes OK."
Paul Wohlberg, who lives next door to the Baleses, said: "I just can't believe Bob's the guy who did this. A good guy got put in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Talk like that infuriates Fred Wellman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel from Fredericksburg, Va., who did three tours in Iraq. He said comments like those of Bales' neighbors and his attorney simply feed into the notion of "the broken veteran."
Wellman does not deny that 10 years of war have severely strained the service. But while others might see Bales as a wounded soul, Wellman sees a man who sneaked off base to commit his alleged crimes, then had the presence of mind to "lawyer up" as soon as he was caught.
"That may play well with certain circles of the civilian community, which doesn't understand our lives," Wellman said. "But he's going to be tried by a military court ... and chances are three or four of those guys had things happen to them, may have had three or four tours, may have lost people, may have been blown up. And NONE of them snapped and killed 16 people." He added: "It's just too easy, and a lot of us, we're not buying it."
Benjamin Busch, a Marine veteran of two tours of Iraq, wrote last week on the website The Daily Beast that he and his comrades are afraid to admit that Bales "lost his mind in war," because that "allows for the possibility that any one of us could go insane at any time, and that every veteran poisoned by their combat experience could be on edge for life."
James Alan Fox, an expert on murder, said Americans can more easily make excuses for Bales because the shootings did not occur here at home.
"Although the victims weren't soldiers or the enemy, they were civilians, many Americans ... literally distance themselves from this case, because it's so far away in a foreign land," said Fox, a professor at Boston's Northeastern University. "It's still mass murder, yet many Americans sort of perceive it differently because it is related to a military situation, as opposed to a private citizen who's murdering other private citizens."
Even some fellow warriors who deplore Bales' alleged acts suggest he should not bear all the blame.
Reacting to a New York Daily News headline labeling the then-unidentified suspect "Sergeant Psycho," Ron Capps wrote an angry piece on Time magazine's blog site.
"To our elected officials and the people who elected them: this is what you get when you refuse to do what is necessary to create and maintain sufficient military force to fight your wars," wrote Capps, who described himself as a 25-year veteran who did a combat tour in Afghanistan.
"This means everything necessary up to and including the implementation of a draft. ... The all-volunteer Army was designed as a peacetime force. It was never supposed to carry us through 10 years of war."
The killings sent Thomas L. Amerson, a retired Navy captain from Ledyard, Conn., back to the history books to explore other stains on America's military history, including the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai. Too often, he argued, Americans absolve the leaders who start the wars and "invest the full responsibility in the combatants themselves and the families that support them."
"These actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have been more than a clash of combatants; they have been a clash of cultures, ideologies, and religions that has blurred the lines of right and wrong," Amerson wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
Amerson asked that Americans "hope for the safety of Sgt. Bales' family and for the ability of his wife and small children to reconcile the person they knew with the one they now face. May they be successful in un-blurring lines that society and courts will, no doubt, fail to distinguish satisfactorily."
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