Our guys were shipped back more or less as freight without any recognition of the loss, but bases shut down if some E-3 on his first deployment blows his brains out. His parents get a gold star, but what about the thousands of contractors who died? Quite a few of them went down fighting, but we'll name a street after a guy who was run over by a forklift.
I once asked the 455th at Bagram what they'd do if one of us died. They didn't have the slightest clue. "Your company will handle that." How will they know? What official entity would even tell them we died?
Crickets. Blank looks.
2016, 15 years of combat later, and this issue lingers? Fuck that. Contractors are the untermensch of the US military. I'm just glad I'm finally around a group that treats us like people...almost like we're their peers. "Almost" is the key word.
Eh, y'all can go back to the thread, but after a decade plus of doing this in the sandbox, it has made me very bitter.
Fuck contractors, right?