{"id":21272,"date":"2010-11-19T11:48:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T15:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=21272"},"modified":"2010-11-19T11:48:52","modified_gmt":"2010-11-19T15:48:52","slug":"matthis-at-tufts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=21272","title":{"rendered":"Matthis at Tufts"},"content":{"rendered":"

For some pointless reason, Tufts Daily, a student newspaper at Tufts University (which for some reason I thought was a conservative, traditional college), published an article by Alexa Sasanow entitled “Veteran Matthis Chiroux speaks out against the US military<\/a>“. Notice it’s not wars he “speaks out against” anymore.<\/p>\n

You can read the whole article for yourself and you’ll recognize they newest Matthis line that it’s the military that’s the problem now, not the wars. Probably because he can’t speak to the war anymore, since it’s been proven that he’s never seen a war. But that doesn’t stop from making people believe he’s been to one without saying he has;<\/p>\n

Chiroux enlisted in the army soon after he graduated from high school, but not because he wanted to: He got into trouble with the police and was given the choice between being prosecuted as an adult in federal court or enlisting.<\/p>\n

“I always say, I’m living proof that we do not have an all?volunteer army,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, he volunteered – he had a choice whether he should sell drugs at a grade school playground or not, and then he had a choice whether he wanted to take responsibility for selling drugs and go to jail, or volunteer to join the Army. A lot of kids his age (18 so how else would he have prosecuted if not as an adult?) don’t get the opportunity to choose.<\/p>\n

After his five years in the army, during which he served as an army strategic communicator and journalist, touring in Japan, Germany, Afghanistan and the Philippines, Chiroux returned to the United States in 2007. He got an apartment in Brooklyn with the one person he knew in New York, a fellow veteran. The two engaged mostly in reckless behavior after returning to civilian life, Chiroux said.<\/p>\n

“I was drinking excessively and being very physically impulsive,” he said. “One Sunday morning, I’d been up all night with a couple of women I was hanging out with \u2014 it was around 9 a.m. \u2014 and somehow we managed to get up on top of a skyscraper right next to Ground Zero. I was wasted and I remember standing on the edge of that building and looking down at the ground and seeing the wall stretch down from the tips of my toes to the sidewalk, 68 stories and the wind blowing. I went off like a rocket and it took me a while until I finally realized I may be having a good time, but there’s something wrong with me.”<\/p>\n

Such self?awareness is difficult for many veterans to manage, Chiroux said, particularly if they’re dealing with post?traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as a reported 319,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are. Chiroux’s New York apartment?mate is one of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, PTSD put him on the roof edge. Even though he’d never witnessed a traumatic event that would cause PTSD. That’s why earlier he mentioned that everyone in the military has PTSD, so you could some sympathy for the ledge-balanced clown. Previously, he’s said that his PTSD was from interviewing real soldiers and hearing their stories. I guess he’s refined his condition.<\/p>\n

He continues on blaming TAH for IVAW booting his scrawney ass;<\/p>\n

While Chiroux had served for a year on the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he has since parted ways with the organization after receiving a lot of backlash from military communities for last March burning an American flag in Lafayette Park at an anti?war rally.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, he left because he’d succeeded in alienating a large number of IVAW members with his behavior for more than two years. I mean if you alienate guys like TJ Buonomo<\/a> and Geoff “Stolen Valor<\/a>” Millard, you’ve really pissed a lot of people off.<\/p>\n

“They buried my friends under the flag and that’s why I burned it. That flag killed my friends; soldiers had that flag on their arm when torturing people at Abu Ghraib,” he continued. “The military, they get to give you a symbol, tell you what it means and send you off to die with it. They’re going to wrap your story in that and burn the truth beneath it \u2014 why wouldn’t I burn it?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m sure Matthis had friends buried with the flag. And if he did, he’d know that’s no way to honor their memory. But it all so much more about Matthis and his Ward Reilly<\/a> image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some pointless reason, Tufts Daily, a student newspaper at Tufts University (which for some reason … Matthis at Tufts<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,37,30,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd","category-ivaw","category-phony-soldiers","category-usual-suspects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}