This bothers me, and I'm not sure why

SPC Joseph Dwyer, a medic from the 3d Squadron, 7th Cavalry photographed in 2003, died of substance abuse on 28 June. This article tells some of the background behind the story and the photo.

I think of a line from David Drake's Redliners, the one book that I will always pack when going to a combat zone:

"Do you believe that the Unity owes its soldiers nothing but burial or a pension, Miss Chun?" I said. My voice didn't rise, but it had less give than the face of an anvil. "Do you think it is to the long-term benefit of the Unity that our citizens regard discharged soldiers as trash that litters our streets and occasionally explodes lethally? Do you?"

I have a hard time relating to civilians, and I certainly did at some times in this leave (which is about to wrap up). I was sitting at a wedding last night in Sligo, Ireland and there were two things I couldn't shake.

One of them was of what we expect our troops to do in places like Nuristan province, Afghanistan...and the unbelievable cognitive dissonance I feel at being at a wedding when people who execute the plans I write are in places like that. That grates on my conscience, sometimes more than at others.

The other was that I was sitting in a place which sits near Northern Ireland, an area which fought an insurgency for forty years. Does every democracy have to fight a civil war? I don't know - and while I certainly don't support the Irish Republican Army, I do have to wonder if the Sinn Fein sign I saw up in a traffic circle here in town is necessarily a bad thing.

That said, the unease I feel about Joseph Dwyer's passing is that we take our soldiers for granted. We take the conflict they fight in as something that no one really wants to pay attention to, and that bothers the hell out of me.

Then what do you do when those soldiers come back as damaged goods?

The mills of the gods, they grind slowly...