War is not a game

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=141321&f=19

I strongly recommend this indepth and very important piece on domestic violence in the military. It draws a direct and very important link between violence and PTSD, and a great history of military efforts to combat domestic violence the past decade - both successes and failures.

People often talk about 'the sacrifices' of military families. This is one of the big ones that is often overlooked by civilians, the war back home.

There are lots of ways to volunteer or support organizations helping families with the transition to bring back home and together. But it is also important to make sure we aren't allowing our political leaders to endlessly just leave our troops in a hostile zone with no clear strategic reason. Every extra deployment creates hundreds of new batterers and a handful of parentless children. That is a fact. Personally I think that alone is too high a cost for the nothing we are achieving in Iraq (to say nothing of the dozens of lost husbands and mothers and the hundreds permanently disabled and scarred).

War is not a game. Its time America stopped acting like it was one.