:::spoiler spoiler
My dumbass asshole brother is a veteran of the WoT. We were never very close since high school, when he decided to become a chud, and I was a lib. When he got back he downplayed his experiences and I naively took him at his word. In reality, while I still don't know much about the specifics, he came back very messed up and at some point (I only found out about it much later) he started "self-medicating" with methamphetamines, to cope with his PTSD. As I said, we weren't close and as you might guess he was pretty withdrawn, so nothing happened for several years, until he finally decided to check himself into the VA to get actual treatment.
But when he checked himself in, the VA tried to cut him off cold turkey, and I'm not very knowledgeable about it, but I believe that's a very dangerous thing to do (I heard something about permanent brain damage and even potentially death) that would probably be grounds for a malpractice suit, except that it's very hard to sue the government. Between fearing those risks and being in a very fucked up mental state, he reacted violently, which put a flag on his record that would make it difficult to get treatment in the future. At the same time, he became paranoid about doctors, causing him to later become uncooperative and check himself out of the various programs my parents tried to get him into.
After he got out, his condition became worse and worse. He exhibited signs of paranoid schizophrenia, and was constantly accusing everyone around him of all kinds of unhinged shit. At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times pulling 60 hour weeks, and I had to stop using Facebook because he would see when I logged on and if I didn't respond right away or left him on read, it would become a whole incident. He was always hinting at doing something violent either to himself or others, but always in a way that left plausible deniability, talking about how he's going to "put an end to this" and things like that. It was like being a 911 operator 24/7. I, at least, was better at setting boundaries, and in time I wrote him off as dead to me. The problem I had was that my parents did not.
One time I went up to visit, and we went out to dinner, which was rare for them at that point. We all knew it was possible, even likely that he'd have yet another breakdown that night because he was always having them, but I think we just kind of pretended that it wasn't going to happen. I'll never forget seeing the tears in my mother's eyes when the texts rolled in and she realized that she wasn't going to be able to relax and enjoy even a single night. Or the time she showed me her phone (it was still an old flip phone with no keyboard where you had to press the numbers to type), and explained through tears about how she'd made a typo and he accused her of doing it on purpose for some reason she couldn't understand. The time my dad texted him a picture of my late sister as a child and he accused him of trying to entrap him for pedophilia.
There was no hope. The writing was on the wall. I knew, I think all of us knew, that this was going to come to a head, and end in blood. I've never been a violent person, but I had a very dark thought, that if it was inevitable that he was going to go out and try to kill some innocent person, then maybe it'd be better if I killed him first. Fortunately, the police were keeping watch on his house. Finally one day I got a call, that he had gone out to someone's house, followed by the cops, and he had pulled a gun on them and got shot, and was now in the hospital. It was utterly unsurprising, and the only thing I felt was immense relief that the nightmare was over.
Because of white privilege, he survived his encounter with the cops and only lost use of a hand. Shockingly, his condition improved a lot afterward, and he's now living a pretty normal life with my parents, although he's still a massive chud who believes shit like antifa starting forest fires. I missed a lot of his mental decline because I was chalking up his meth-addled delusions to typical right wing nonsense so I'm not exactly thrilled that he's watching shit like OAN. He doesn't deserve the second chance that he got. He should've died and someone else should've lived in his place.
Throughout all of this, I could never forget how easy we had it. How lightly we got off. I didn't even experience the war firsthand. I experienced it secondhand, and only from the side that got off so, so much easier, just so ridiculously easy. I thought about the pain I felt seeing the tears in my mother's eyes, and I multiplied that pain a hundred, a thousand times, I multiplied it to the highest scale my brain can conceive of, and in that I grasped some tiny, distant inkling of awareness of the pain that my country wrought. And I take that pain and I channel it into hatred of the ghouls responsible for those stupid fucking wars.
And yet the libs expect me to vote for Joe fucking Biden.
