First let me take a few paragraphs to clear the decks for those of you who will read the following and perhaps brand me an insensitive monster. I left Vietnam in 1966 with symptoms of PTSD even though at that time there was no such diagnosis; that entire concept and concern would come later, years too late for me. Like the warriors returning from WWII, I was left to work it out on my own. My therapy was to get a job and go back to college followed shortly by marrying the beautiful West Texas girl who is with me still a half century later.

Military psychiatry had diagnoses from earlier wars such as battle stress and combat fatigue, neither of which applied to me. In Vietnam, the only warriors I know who might qualify for such a diagnosis were the Marines at Khe Sanh who endured continual bombardment for months. That didn’t apply to me, an infantry NCO who spent endless boring days searching for the enemy that occasionally were interrupted by brief but intense and deadly firefights when we finally found them. Those sweeps and patrols were interspersed with break periods back within the wire of our base camp where we usually had sufficient time to wind down from the needle-pricking tension and excitement, even exhilaration, of engaging the enemy we’d been sent to find and destroy.

But there was one combat experience that was simply too hard to dispel from your mind once you’d witnessed it. While back in the rear we’d sit and drink and boast of blowing Charley’s ass all to hell, the one conversation that never occurred was that of the horrible outcome of war on the civilian populace, especially the women and children. The horrible things which the Viet Cong and NVA did to those Vietnamese whom they considered disloyal or simply neutral were not uncommon events; once witnessed by Western eyes, they got locked away and never talked about simply because there was no way to start such an unholy conversation, much less talk it through and talk it out. The only good thing that can be said of those atrocities is that they inspired us to hunt down and kill the ruthless bastards who had done such horrible things to the innocents.

So, denied and undiscussed, it stayed locked up in our minds, pushed away, intentionally ignored and unsuccessfully denied. That was the PTSD that I and untold numbers of others brought home with us from that war. It took decades to push it so far back that it didn’t trouble us anymore but as I tap this keyboard, it is coming to the fore, thankfully without the power over me it once had.

So those are my bonafides to have and offer an opinion on the events taking place now in Gaza where my soldierly instincts tell me that the warriors experiencing what I just described are those of the Israeli Defense Forces while the perpetrators of atrocities against civilians are the same forces that we have witnessed for decades being incredibly cruel and inhuman, both to their captured enemies and their own civilian populations. Like our Vietnamese foe, these jihadists (I can’t bring myself to call them warriors) seem to relish the fear they engender among their own populations with demonstrations of extremely callous and uncaring destruction of civilians.

Where Hamas and other jihadist groups take it a step farther than the Vietnamese usually did, is that they are the very ones who make the destruction of civilians happen by their placement of their offensive weapons systems in places where any humanitarian nation will have second thoughts about attacking them. There is plenty of evidence to show that Hamas uses private homes, schools, and hospitals to shield their weapons placements and their operations.

The easiest way to say it is that they hide behind the skirts and diapers of those they profess to love. Worse, once civilian casualties have occurred, these monsters video the results and broadcast them to the world as evidence of their enemy committing atrocities against their women and children even though they are the ones who invited destruction upon them. The world is treated to endless visions of lifeless children being mourned by the same Islamic males whose religious fanaticism and unbridled hatred of Jews brought about those very same deaths.

And the liberal idiots, the useful idiots, the anti-Semitic leftist media breathlessly report all the Hamas propaganda as legitimate news of Israeli atrocities. Unfortunately for them, there are far too many old soldiers, all around the world, whose lives have led them down this tragic path before and who aren’t fooled by the amateurish misinformation being disseminated by these soulless jihadi pigs. No matter the legitimacy of your political claim, if you deliberately arrange the killing of the innocent, especially the children, you are a despicable pig undeserving of the least mercy from the IDF when they catch you and blow you and your  Diaper Defense all the way to hell.