Your Turn: New Category Of Deserter

It may be obvious, but I think the deal with this photo is that they’re neither running nor confined. It’s often the case that desertion is a terrible betrayal; the bucolic setting nicely mutes that aspect by implying that there are no men suffering the wounds of war in their stead.

I guess I might as well embarrass myself. At first glance, I saw the photo and read the first statement of the post: “On the surface, it reflects a practical matter, backs turned to protect identity.”
Practical matter, privacy… I thought they were… uh… relieving themselves. And I wondered “Is that how men are? They have this whole landscape, and they have to stand right next to each other?”
Anyway… the sky in the background is beautiful; they could be two guys standing in a studio with a photo as a background.
I understand they have their backs turned for privacy, but it also reminds me of someone giving us their back as a sign of disrespect. I guess they don’t mean it that way, though.
Those new camouflage uniforms do the trick in the grass, at the bottom of the picture. I don’t know how they’d do in a desert, though.
Narboink, apparently what keeps some others from deserting is that sense of duty to their fellow soldiers. But I agree with quax. Apparently, guys like them are being sent back, though, often on medications.

I am a veteran of the Vietnam War, having served in Thailand. When I went school after the war, I met many veterans who were probably crazy, but functioning at a high enough level to get into college. These guys were not clerks, they were veterans of actual shooting combat. They spent a few weeks on the “front,” and were rotated back to base regularly. They went to Vietnam for ONE YEAR!
The new veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are being sent back with NO BREAKS, for multiple tours. Yesterday, the tours were extended to fifteen months! That some soldiers are deserting after a tour or after two tours is not amazing. What I find to be amazing is that these soldiers are just walking away, instead of hunting down and killing the elected officials who sent them into battle.

re : “relieving themselves”
in all the many shades of meaning that that phrase conjures, ummabdulla, literally and figuratively ~ your description is brilliant.
(would that i were not such a wordy old birdy, and could cut to the chase with such remarkable clarity

the “Psychological Kevlar” Act of 2007…
=> Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War :
“Since World War II, our military has sought and found any number of ways to override the values and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families, schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram their human software, overriding those characteristics that are inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their own species. “Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli,” says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, “and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy: Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely — and understandably — suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.””
e.g., the Ludovico technique : a drug induced moral lobotomy.