Justin Ropke is dead. He was an Afghanistan war vet who got addicted to heroin and—like pretty much everyone who enjoys that drug—he OD’d. I know of him because he was allegedly involved in the “urinating on the Taliban” incident from five years ago, and I think his death is a good example of how our disdain for the troops leads to their deaths.
In January 2012, four soldiers pulled out their dicks and pissed on bomb makers who were blowing up their brothers. The MSM was outraged by this abhorrent behavior. How dare our troops not act like 18th-century aristocrats as Muslims dismember their fellow Marines and literally eat their beating hearts. Allen West injected some sanity into the debate and said, “Shut your mouth, war is hell.” The Middle East is hell. The stories you hear from vets sound like someone reporting from another planet. “They would cut the ears off stray dogs with shearing scissors,” one soldier told me, “just for a laugh.” (It saddens me that most readers will identify with that story more than the idea of real humans being dismembered.) The IEDs planted by the Taliban were dismembering and disfiguring the best we have to offer, yet we’re meant to respect terrorist corpses when they accidentally blow themselves up? Fuck that.
