I read this and I wept for Tommy Atkins

We used to set them to selling matches or making poppies, the limbless, the gassed, the blind; things are immeasurably better, if not ideal; it is foolish in the extreme, however, to train split-second killers, to psych them up, threatened from all sides, in a war with no front line and then to discharge them into a society regulated, corralled, categorised, cv-ed to fucking death, surveyed and policed as never before. Wiser men than Brown and his misfits would see the urgency and put stepping stones in place but he is a life-long Atlanticist and dooms us to repeating Uncle Sam's disastrous treatment of his own veterans; shattered in body or mind or both, Tommy returns to a civilian society as alien to him as is he to it. It has ever been so but now that we are so clever we should demand better, for Tommy and for us. The soldier, though, deals in the harshest of truths, this unblooded crop of politicians in the meanest of soundbites; the mad bastard, Brown, attuned only to his own pathetic ranting, unwilling and unfit to think of - much less speak to - the weighty matter of arms and the man.

By Ishmael, aka Stanislav, from a long and heartbreaking post.