Psychological Rebuild? Mission Impossible.

          My male cousin, who is a few months older than me, signed up for the Marines last year and went through boot camp in January.  When he returned he told my family some stories about his experience.  We also watched a video that the new Marines are given that summarizes their time at boot camp.  I was pretty appalled by what I saw in this video.  Immediately upon arrival the recruits  have to surrender nearly all personal possessions, and they are screamed at since minute one.  The rest of the film shows the various weeks and the Marines' progression.  They are constantly yelled at and showered with insults.  Those who are higher up in command literally have the job of psychologically destroying the recruits.  As we touched on in class today, the goal of boot camp, and of other subsequent military training, is to breakdown the personal identity of the recruits so that they literally are the state. Their identities become the group, the nation.  What I saw in the video was intense, but then my cousin told us that what they show is "mild", like that's the nice side of boot camp.
          I remember one particular story.  My cousin told us about a recruit who made some minor violation (it was so seemingly insignificant to me that I've since forgotten what exactly it was) and the commanding officer screamed at him while he ate his breakfast.  The guy in control got so up in the recruit's face that he was actually spitting on him, and the spit rolled down the kid's face and dripped into his breakfast, and he had to keep eating it.  This seems disgusting and out of control to me, but in boot camp this kind of behavior is not considered to be abuse.  It's the whole point of the psychological breakdown tactic.
          When you look at it this way, it's no wonder soldiers often have serious mental and emotional problems when they come home.  It's no surprise that the frequency of domestic violence in military families is so high; soldiers are trained to feel nothing and know only the offense and defense of war- they are taught to forget their emotional/intuitive side. The fact is that most of the time soldiers are treated as disposable and in many ways it's really tragic.
         But no one wants to talk about this, so people overcompensate by over-glorifying the idea of the military.  First of all, there are many other honorable career paths to take, so acting as though the military is so much above any other life choice is a little insulting to all of us who plan to change the world by choosing other paths. (I'm not saying that joining the military is not honorable or brave, but it's not by any means the only remarkable choice.)  Secondly, what good is this excessive glorification if we don't appropriately take care of soldiers psychologically when they return home? When such a huge amount of energy is put into the psychological breakdown of every recruit, how can they possibly be expected to build themselves up again and lead normal lives? 
        Maybe we should be spending more time and money on helping those who come home, and those who feel they have no other way to make money or get an education other than to join the military, rather than building up an even larger military force and sending more people to the same demise.  In turn, this would benefit not only young people and veterans, but their spouses, children, friends, and parents.  We need a better system.