Veterans try talking about trauma

On BBC News I found a very interesting article by Richard Allen Greene called Veterans try talking about trauma. After the article there was a place where people could write in comments telling about the trauma their families had experienced because of war. The best part of the article is the comments that people wrote because you could hear the different ways that war affected people from all over the world. For example, Haider from Bagdad, Iraq wrote that for three days he and his family were stuck in his house while the Republican Guards bombed their neighborhood. He found his neighbor's body parts on the roof of his house because a bomb blew his body parts away. The daughters of Haider have nightmares and they cry anytime they hear loud noise because it reminds them of the sounds of the loud bombs that happened outside thier house. This experience can cause mental disease. People from many different places in the world responded to the article. There were people writing from Iraq, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Egypt. Cheng from Canada wrote about a patient that killed a young 14 year old child in Vietnam and now he has nightmares about watching the kid die and also he can never eat meat because he shot the boy in the head. He feels like he is a murderer even though he only was a soldier doing what the government told him to do. The poor guy has suffered a lot and we have to admire him in a way for all his suffering. Marwan from Iraq had lived in war since he was six years old because of Iran, Kuwait and the UN sanctions. Living in constant war caused him not to fear death because he saw it everyday. People dying was part of his life, he thought that it was natural and so he doesn't have fear of death. He is also always worried about gas, water and food because they had to live sometimes without any because of the wars. He is very controlling and always trying to plan his life to make sure he has gas, water and food. Another comment from John in England said that he fought in the Gulf War with his twin brother and the war made his brother lose his marriage. He thinks that all ex-service people are socially strange because it is a coping mechanism to deal with what they have done. People who go to war feel guilty because they have killed people. The president tells them to kill people so they have no control they have to do what the president says. They have to live with it and think that when war is over I won't kill anyone again and I am not a bad person. They can do community service to feel better. I am going to research about effects of war on children and especially child soldiers. I am interested in researching child soldiers because I am in MUN and it is the topic in my committee. I have already learned a few things about child soldiers like girls are used as sex slaves, some boys are told to rape girls, some child soldiers have never had a normal life or family, there are about 300,000 child soldiers in the world, and Uganda, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Somalia all have child soldiers.