Green Plastic Soldiers - But Not Toys

These little pieces of art are powerful. They may look like the little green plastic soldiers that many of us played with as children, but they're not. These are not for sale, but are meant to remind us that the horrors of war don't necessarily stop when soldiers are brought back home. Far too often that just marks the beginning of new problems -- problems that are a result of their wartime experiences. These pictures are from the website wearedorothy.com.

Here's what the website has to say:

The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A seperate investiagtion into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.