War: personal or political?

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I recently received an email from a friend whose friend's son had been sent home from Iraq because he was suicidal. He received no treatment, only observation for 24 hours before going home. After less than a week he was ordered to report for duty to return to his unit in two or three days. The decision was made and orders given even before he has been seen by a psychiatrist or any kind of counseling. Basically they are sending back a mentally unstable person to carry a weapon into a close combat situation. This appears to me to put not only him but all of the other military personnel in his unit. My friend opened her email with the declaration that now the war was personal. My perspective is that war is always personal for all of us. But we tend to try to ignore that until reality comes smacking us in the face. We did the same thing with the Viet Nam war, a very similar war by the way. And when our veterans returned we didn't give them the treatment and support that they needed. Later we created a new diagnosis, Viet Nam Syndrome, when some of those veterans couldn't hold it together and went on killing sprees, exploded in uncontrolled violence at home, or drank and drugged themselves to death. What happens to one of us affects us all. Even if you do not have a son/daughter or brother/sister or father/mother or lover in the military, we SHOULD be taking it personally if anyone is being put in harms way. You see, we are the ones responsible for sending them there to fight in a war that doesn't have clear reasons for us to be there, to fight in a war where you can't tell the enemy from the ally, to fight a war that we have little or not understanding of their tactics, culture, thinking pattern. As citizens of a democratic government we choose by our votes the leaders who make those decisions. If we don't like what the leaders are doing, it is our responsibility to change the leadership. And from the shape of things in the U.S. in the world, we need some BIG changes. The rate we have been changing is too slow. We need to make drastic changes fast. We need to come together as informed and caring citizens and work our government into something with integrity and compassion and foresight and good conscience. I think we are ready for a woman in the White House - probably not Hillary, however - and women leadership in the legislatures and the judicial systems. We need to change perspectives. We need the unique perspective of women. We need powerful female leaders who are strong enough not to have to lean on the Good Old Boy system. When our founders created our government they took the pattern from Native Americans. However, they refused to accept the Council of Women as an important part of the governing system. The Council of Women was made up of women who had children of warrior age. The had the power to accept or deny the choice of War Chief and they had the final say in whether or not the tribe went to war. I think that rejecting the Council of Women was our first mistake.