Marilyn Tassy wrote:$250,000 to get outta town?
If I were stuck there I suppose I'd have to learn the language and change my way of dressing and acting. cause I couldn't afford the $500,000 for 2 people to leave.
I know some people say why on earth would anyone move over to that place to begin with but then again, my relations think we are weird to live in Hungary.
How many times have I heard the phrase, "come home" over the years.
Of course we were also guilty of telling my sister to,"come home" when she lived in the UK.
How on earth could anyone sign up to be a mercenary at any price?
....
My step-father was was a 2 time US POW was a huge drinker.
For several years my mother was able to control his drinking and made him get a job so he had no time to dwell in the past or drink.
God knows how she put up with him at all.
Nice guy but mentally gone,too much war baggage in his life.
My mother always had a soft spot for strays...
Obviously people in conflict zones cannot "go home". They are already there.
I think the $250K was aimed at country diplomats and so on, so governments paid. Basically a convoy of Hum Vees with heavily armed people, machine guns and multiple bullet proof VIP cars. Chances of being hit were incredibly high either by insurgents or blown up by IEDs. Either way, chances of being dead I'd put at quite a lot. Might have been easier to go by taxi wearing a burka and keeping silent. Blend in with the locals etc.
Back in WW2 and WW1 and any conflict perhaps until the end of Viet Nam, people didn't know about PTSD or they thought it was fake. Look at the film Rambo. Just typical of the post-Vietnam type story. And then there's the veterans in other wars hiding in mountains and trying to isolate themselves. You can see how that trauma could end up being numbed by a bottle or two. Those guys just left to fester without help. Shocking.
I see the US has put 8500 troops on standby. It's an interesting ploy but in the general scheme of things it seems too small. I think I heard Russia has upped it's troops to 120,000. Getting worse, not better. I saw some Russian diplomat on TV saying the West should look at Russia's offer. Yeah, like that's going to fly. The Russian military exercises off Ireland is quite a bad scenario - report I heard was that 70% of the transatlantic cables go via that zone. Ireland's neutral country with no military to speak of. They have no chance of stopping the Russian from cutting the cables.