Something angry. olitical, personal embarrassing.

[pecunium]

Feel free to comment, but be aware you do so at your peril.

I just lost my cool. It's been a hard couple of days. I am pondering a couple of major changes in my life, which is stress. I was drafted to the estate sale at the last minute, and did it out of duty, not real desire.

I've had little sleep, for the past two days and then...

The guys here (I came down to do some gaming) started talking about the Marines shooting injured people in Falluja. I happen to have stong opinions about it. There are mitigating circumstances, but that is all they are. Fear, anger etc. don't give one a by. A crime of passion is still a crime.

The response to this was people who accuse me of having a lack of moral fibre, because I disagree on things relating to religion, engaging in moral relativism. See, the Marines were scared, and some people had been faking dead, when they were only injured, so they could kill attack Marines, so that made it not only understandable, but correct to shoot anyone who looked funny.

That sort of thing irritates me. Having this soft, civilian fuck, who has never had spent any real time in a place where life and death were actualy at stake tell me, not once, not twice, but three times, that I didn't understand what it was like, well I lost it.

Screaming at him that I most certainly did. No content. No reason. No explanation that he was being relativistic (he'd already discounted the facts, and was saying that if the men hadn't left before the Marines stopped letting them (some three weeks before the attack started) then they deserved to get killed, even though if the situation were reversed, he'd be shooting at people who acted like we did.

Nope. I was just yelling that I had been there. I had to be shut up. Told to chill. Which was right. I was over the line in the level of my reponse.

I don't think I was wrong, and I'm not sorry for laying into the him. I am sorry I blew up. I am even sorrier that I am in that contained mode I was in when I was fresh out of theater.

Terry is not a happy camper right now.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Well, I have lost it with people who didn't have kids and had no psychological or medical training who tried to tell me how to parent a child with ADHD, learning disabilities, anxiety, depression, and some physical disability, so I certainly don't think your losing it in this situation was out of line. (Maybe I'm just making excuses for myself, but I don't think so.) For me, "I have been through it and you haven't" usually trumps everything except maybe an honest-to-goodness expert neutral observer.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I am of a mixed mind on the value of experience as a debating tool. Intimate contact with the subject matter is a tricky thing to evaluate, beause it is limited.

We tell interrogation students they are going to get an unbelievably detailed picture, of a very tiny bit of the war, but the bigger picture will be completely beyond their ken.

I've never had to deal with booby-traps. Not on objects, and certainly not on bodies of the dead/dying. Which is why the Marine gets my sypathy and understanding. Why he doesn't get my condemntation. But those don't get him my forgiveness.

I don't know what I'd do on a court. Probably find against him (unless the evidence the defense presents is pretty compelling there was an immediate threat, not evident from the facts so far presented) and then give him an honorable discharge.

A felony conviction, and back to the civilian world.

TK

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Intimate contact with the subject matter is a tricky thing to evaluate, beause it is limited.

Yes, you're right, of course. But there are certain kinds of information where I think the first-hand kind should prevail, and among those is "This is what it feels like to be in this situation."

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the only person I know (personally) who has intimate knowledge of booby-traps (in a military fashion) is someone I consider an unreliable witness for the duration of this "war".