The Forever War: "Leftovers of these Terrible Times"

While reading a chapter in The Forever War I was surprised about the amount of cruelty people can submit other human beings to and how the people he talks to just seem weary and how they are used to this type of life. In one part a man named Yusef talks about how his brother suddenly disappeared and how he and his mother anxiously waited weeks to hear anything about what happened to him. Then three weeks later he got a call from an official telling him to come and pick up the body of his executed brother. When Yusef got there the waiting official told him that he should be grateful because most families never receive a body. Yusef then had to thank the man for being so kind as to return the body of his dead body, but before he could get his brothers body he then had to pay one-hundred fifty dinars for the two bullets that killed him. The fact that living in a world where people mysteriously disappear and are found to have been executed weeks later can be normal for people is saddening to me. The author makes a comment about how people like Yusef are less like survivors and more like the leftovers of these terrible times.
More examples of this are later when the author talks about how torture was so common in Iraq that the videos of torture could be bought in the marketplace and how when he got frustrated with these people he remembers a time when he saw a group of men silently watching the torture of another men and how none of them seemed to be able to speak. When he mentioned this I started to think about the people who stereotype the Iraqi people as all of them being crazy and evil terrorists and I want to show them this book. I feel like it gives a horrible realization to how these people have lived their entire lives dealing with torture and pain and death. Now when a friend of mine who is in the army talks negatively about these people I want to ask her if she really has any understanding of their lives at all or if she is just going off of the way they are portrayed in the media. This book recently has shown me that there is a large majority of people who were given no media attention who are real casualties of this ongoing war that existed long before we were involved in their affairs.