Oddbean

Please share. I’m not techy and haven’t figured out to to have a big reach on Nostr yet: When I was 17, I signed up for the US Marine Corps. By the grace of God I failed their medical exam and never completed enlistment. One of my best friends from high school did. Two years later, he called me in the middle of the night from Germany. He had been shot in Iraq and was being flown home for emergency treatment. The next morning I picked up his mom and drove the distraught woman who spoke very little English 23 hours straight, only stopping for gas, to be there when he got home. In the hospital I watched as the nurse turned off the light in the room to shine a flashlight on his wound to check for infection. The bullet entered his back between his spine and his shoulder blade and mercifully made a turn to exit through his upper arm, missing any organs but shattering his arm completely. In that dark room I could see the light of the flashlight passing fully 9” through his body. I could also smell the rotting flesh from the infection she was checking for. The smell got worse for weeks before they got it under control. He was unbearable to be around and I will never forget that sweet acrid smell. He took most of a year to recover and eventually tried to start a civilian life. Broken by war, he couldn’t hack it and eventually reenlisted serving at least two more tours of duty with the army. Last I heard he was a drill instructor teaching other young boys to do what broke him. We’ve lived very different lives and have grown apart but still talk a couple times a year. The conversations are challenging for me but I try to remember his life has been vastly different from mine. He will often say things like “I need to get back to war, I miss killing people”. I have nothing to say to those comments. I just feel tremendous sadness for him, his family and for the lives he has destroyed under orders from the government I fund (under duress) through taxes and inflation. That is what drives me to save in Bitcoin. It is the only way for me to shield some of the value of my labor capital from the military industrial congressional complex that has destroyed millions of lives around the world including in our own military. Number-Go-Up is an incredible feature and one that I enjoy very much, but if I all I accomplish in being a Bitcoiner is forcing the government to be a little bit smaller and more accountable to the people it is intended to represent, that is enough for me. If one less mother has to bury a son, that is a worthy outcome. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/military-industrial-complex-killing-us-all