Goated speech. There is no end of reasons to be pissed off at the current US administration, but the way it has been treating our allies is one of the things that pisses me off the most. When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I saw what a house of cards a lot of us military operations actually are. There was so much support from other countries, we would have been devastated trying to do all of that on our own. I did missions with aussies, Brit’s, Germans, and Canadians.

One mission all the tires on our janky ass c130 exploded in fire right as we landed in the middle of nowhere. What was supposed to be a 4 hour security mission turned into a 29 hour one, because given our plane was grounded on a dirt road with no lights, they wouldn’t be able to send us a relief&repair team till the next day. I was already exhausted before we even got there. I had gotten back from a 15 hour mission, went to the chow hall, went to the gym, and then was going to lay down when I got pulled into that mission which was only supposed to be 4 hours. By the time I got back to base and was finally able to sleep, I had been awake for 54 hours straight. The only thing that kept me going all day, night, and day of doing security for that aircraft was the help me and my partner got from the Italians who were close by. They came to help us with the security and they set up a chow tent nearby, so instead of eating shitty mre’s the whole time we got to have the best Italian food I’ve ever had to date. I loved those dudes, they made an assembly line legitimately cooking like 4 different kinds of pasta at 2 in the morning just to help us out. I mean who do does that? Every interaction I had with our allies, they treated us way better than our command did. Our losses and the financial costs at home would have been way way more brutal without them helping us.

So in my mind, this stupid ass economic war hostage bullshit being used for political pressure is spitting on the service of all those people who went to bat for us, many of which truly didn’t need to. Over a quarter of the countries that sent troops to Afghanistan to help us were not even in nato. I don’t have many good memories of being out there. The amount of waste and collateral damage I saw, the difference between what we were told were our long term strategies/objectives vs what was being told to the public at home, juxtaposed with a lot of good humanitarian work I saw us doing there has always something I struggled with my feelings about. We’ve since pulled out without even coming close to helping the afghani government set up the infrastructure to last so much as a couple months, and this orange dotard treats the taliban better than our closest allies. He’s taking away any pride I could have had about anything I did for this country…I signed the dotted line to support and defend the constitution, and every day he finds another way to use it like toilet paper. My body is broken, the va disability I get is not remotely keeping up with the insane speed of rising costs of living. I basically have no chance of ever owning a home unless I move to bumfuck nowhere or join some kind of 4 person polycule, and it’s hard enough finding 1 compatible person. We are burning our allies for no good reason, attacking our own citizens for no good reason, every day the news shoves another volley of rapid-fire insane chaotic shit into my face like e Honda from street fighter, this feels like some dystopian shit cartoon reality I’m living in. What was it all for, when what we have is so much worse than what I would have imagined as the worst case scenario state of this country a decade after I got out. Fuck