a_red_panda:
My judgement regarding his past is based strictly on stories he has told about himself. They largely involve him laughing about him doing mean or rude things to other people. I would never bash a person for being a veteran or disrespect what they went through in the military. But I refuse to let it be a free pass for some guy to act like a jerk to people. What he did for his country is absolutely respectable but who he is as a person pretty much ends there. If he were under attack for being a veteran, I would completely defend him. I am just in the difficult situation of separating what is PTSD behavior which should be defended and what is loudmouth jerk behavior which should absolutely not be defended since he is not exactly the poster-child for vets everywhere. As a veteran, would it make any sense for me to just tell people he is allowed to act like a jerk because he is a veteran? I think this is maybe why I don't appear to act like a veteran. Comradery is good, I just don't believe in blind comradery. Perhaps you are all assuming that I was on the ground too. I performed several deployments to the Persian gulf in the Navy and put up with a lot of crap in the military, as we all did. I freely admit however that getting shot at just isn't one of them.

This however is not about me. It is about everyone I work with. I should probably clarify why this is a problem and why my focus is more on this guy that everyone else. As I stated, no one is trying to attack his character and we have all mostly already learned to avoid any conversation with him related to either politics or the military. Both vets and non-vets at work understand he has been through a lot and give him a lot of leeway. This is a professional office environment however, and it is problematic when people walk past his desk and see some guy on a motorcycle getting blow to chunks from a mortar round, or for him to repeatedly tell people he would rather be killing "hajis", or for him to single out the nicest guy at work for no reason and spend several months trying to convince people to hate him, or for him to have trouble forming a sentence without the word hate in it, or for him to rant about hating homosexuals and liberals, or for him to just socially cut himself off and not talk to people. This is why I said he is forming problems for himself; he is the source of a hostile work environment for others and is scaring people. No one is out to get him but there is just no ignoring some of these things.