Persian Gulf War: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Pearl Harbor

The country caught a break in between 1975 and 1980, long enough for disco to die and Francis Ford Coppola to make a movie about it.

 Along came the republican regime and a nine year itch following the gas crisis a trillion dollar deficit and a president who wore a cardigan.

 Now that conservatives could don their navy blue pin stripes and red ties again, the power struggle became what to do with an exponential credit ceiling and an entire macroeconomic policy based on a cocktail napkin.

 It took less than a decade to find a worthy opponent to flex our munitions on a lonely peninsula tucked between Africa and the Himalayas.

 But we forgot something.

 ”He would be a bucking bronco of a man. His hand would be against every man,” is the paraphrase Abraham gave his illegitimate son.

If you believe Ishmael is the father of the Arab people, and these words echoed from the first book of Moses are true, then throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care.

 Middle east conflict from before Christ to the year of our Lord would not be enough of a hint not to mess with the Holy Land where the kingdom itself was divided shortly after Solomon until the exercise in 1948 when joint American South African and Israeli forces temporarily pushed back Islam.

 Israel was surrounded detonating civil uprising armed with Russian made hardware peaking in 1967 when heroes like Moshe Dyan sported black eye patches claiming desert victory on the backs of khaki colored tanks.

 If we were looking for a fight we should have left this place alone.

 Iraq has been no stranger to war since the cradle of civilization was called Babylon and Nimrod built an obelisk pointed straight at heaven.

 Which brings us to our first key phrase, post traumatic stress disorder.

 The first word in this phrase comes from the Latin meaning “after.”

 A war needs to end in order for there to be post anything.

 We caught a collective break in between the seventies and eighties for the whole country to have a post war experience.

 This was the brief spell when every green camo wearing veteran was alternating between heroine and methadone.

 Drug abuse was one way traumatized nineteen year olds coped with the horror non Vietnamese civilians only viewed in the movie theater after the Exorcist and Halloween exposed naive audiences to something called gore.