The exit wound is often larger

When you read the thoughts of so many, you automatically remember the commonalities among them. In Exit Wounds the clear winner is anger. Some admit to now having quick tempers, others flying into rages and more just always angry at everything and everyone. The most common reason for joining in the first place was to get money for college, which speaks volumes all by itself. Many joined the “National” Guard, seeking to avoid offshore combat.

A tour of war duty changes you. You cannot come back the same. And it’s never for the better. All the men and women profiled in Exit Wounds are spending their lives trying to fit back in somehow, and most are struggling. A large percentage of them are trying to help others do it, meaning they will be in this mode all their lives. This is the promise of war.

Jim Lommasson has collected stories from people who don’t normally want to talk. They keep it bottled up inside, for life. But inside, they must be constantly rehashing and refining it, because when coaxed or cajoled by Lommasson, it all comes out, clearly, cogently, rationally, eloquently, purposefully. Sometimes orally, sometimes in writing. Veterans know they’ve changed, that they don’t fit any more, and for most, that they were misled into thinking they were exporting democracy and peace on behalf of the good guys. It’s hard to live with all that, and the result is alcohol, drugs, and suicide.

There is a most insightful testament from a military wife, on how she has had to twist her own life to keep her marriage together. The final blow, in the last testament, is a plaintive admission of guilt by proxy, from a Marine’s mother, who recounts how her son slaughtered an innocent couple of families.

Much as in Vietnam, we trained the military to revile the people they were supposedly freeing and fighting for. In Vietnam they called the locals gooks. In Iraq, hadjis. Not the best basis for working together. No basis whatsoever for respect. The result is guilt, and an abiding resentment of American desk-jockey politicians and the war profiteers who bribe them. Many have been quite simply radicalized:

“I understood that something about life had changed; life had become something to be afraid of. One must defend one’s self against life. Because that is what war does to us. We have to do all those horrible things because we were poor and unfortunate, and we are citizens of a nation run by psychopaths.”

David Wineberg ( )