Thread by @JackMurphyRGR

Amazing interview today w/ @_Shan_Martinez_ discussing extremism in the military. Shannon became a neo-Nazi as a teenager near a military base and knew over 30 soldiers involved before she left the movement. The interview will be on @starsandstripes but I wanted to share this 🧵

Me: I want to ask what your perspective is on this on why there are so many veterans involved at the Capitol Building riots this last week.

Shannon: there are lots of different folks that showed up that we saw there, that there are many different strains in iteration of things,

so to speak about the people who were there as any sort of monolith, or one sort of cohesive group would be a serious misstep in my opinion. I think, it's so much of what so many veterans experience and feel when they leave, you know, it's like this sense of

purpose that was present in their life for their time that they were in, it's gone. The sense of, like, identity and belonging, it's gone. Often their lives are way less structured. And, I mean, okay, if you're, you know, if you're an infantryman, what are you qualified to do

here in the real world or whatever, like, you know...

Me: Hey, this is getting personal now!

Shannon: Right, but like you've been invested in, like you've had hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in your training. And now that you're a civilian, again,

that training doesn't prepare you for anything that is happening out here. You know, like, finding a job with the qualifications that you have, or whatever can be incredibly, incredibly difficult. And then, if you have spent any time in combat zones, there is very likely trauma

from that. That is part and parcel of that, especially in this you know, in this era of multiple tours of duty in combat zones. That I think that that is something that sense of loss and grieving, that I think is not really talked about.

In terms of when people leave, and it's like, okay, like you've been trained to utilize violence as something heroic, right, that's what we ask of people, as American citizens of our military, to be willing to do that, so that we don't have

to do those things. Well, like, what how do you re engage with the world...

Me: you apply template when you come home?

Yeah. You know, I mean, from things like the veteran suicide rates and everything that our veterans are really

, really struggling that, you know, I mean, we've been at conflict, we've been in armed conflict for, you know, 20 years. Yeah.