Originally Posted by pan6467

Ok.... now you are a man returning from Iraq. You did your duty and watched POWs for a week or 2. The worst thing you ever did was withhold food and exercise 1 day, because you were ordered to. You were lucky enough never to have had to shoot at anyone.

You come home, you have a wife in the University's Master's of Social Work program. Basically you are coming home with the belief you have a nice life ahead.

You get home.

Your wife, you find has become an anti war supporter. No problem, you love her, you even agree with what she says... you were there because you needed to pay for college and got called to go. You truly saw no choice.

So, you start telling your wife what you did and what you saw and when you get to the point of having withheld the rations 1 day to a POW that refused to follow rules and tried to create problems. Your wife tells you you tortured that person and starts despising you. Eventually, she stops sleeping in the same bed. They tried marriage counseling, she couldn't get over the fact "you tortured a man". She starts telling you that she no longer can love a man that treated someone in such a way.

Within 2 months she tells you to leave and she wants a divorce. You never drank or did drugs, but now you find yourself doing anything to mask that pain of losing your wife because you followed orders.

A year goes by, you have by dropped out of school, got kicked out of the reserves for drug use and find yourself in a detox facility.

You are confused and unsure of living life anymore because what you did while there, withholding food.

Hence, I want to know the answer to the question, what does one consider torture?

If your husband or wife or anyone in your family came home and told you that they had to withhold a day's rations, would you consider them a torturer?