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Friday, March 16. 2012
Our Heroes
It’s a terrible thing, what happened in Afghanistan. An Army staff sergeant goes outside the base and murders 16 people in their sleep, nine of them children. The man was captured, turned himself in really, and the military authorities started their process of apologizing.War is a terrible thing. It’s one of the most barbaric and communally insane activities we do to each other. We sugarcoat it by making the warriors “heroes,” justifying it with themes like “the good war.” Regardless of how we treat it and our participation in it, war is a terrible thing.
If you spend any time around a Veterans Administration hospital you will see the residual horror of the two most recent wars we’ve been in: Iraq and Afghanistan. People with missing limbs, missing ears and eyes. Parts of the their skulls replaced with various metals, paraplegics and quadriplegics — and those with wounds we can’t see, but they and their families experience every night and day.
It’s troubling, disturbing, to see the way we celebrate our warriors who return from war. We treat them as heroes, when, for many of them, being a hero is the furthest thing from their minds. We celebrate it in such a way it looks inviting and appealing to young kids. What young child wouldn’t want to be a part of SEAL Team 6 or Marine MARSOC or Army Rangers or the Air Force AFSOC.
It’s seductive. These guys are the tip of the spear, they very tip and the military advertises them in their recruitment campaigns because deep down, not even that deep, everyone who joins the military at least fantasizes about being in the Special Forces.
Once you get there it’s an entirely different show. It isn’t the recruitment commercial or video. Special Forces training alone sends most aspirants packing. It’s brutal. And then the men and women deploy and whether they are in special ops or not, war is so many levels more brutal than training participants rarely (if ever) find the words sufficient to describe it.
It wears on their minds and souls and our warriors are trained to internalize it. They don’t want to talk about it anyway. What are you gonna say? “We went out into the hills above this village and blew the heads off all these Taliban and my buddy Bob got his legs blown off by a grenade.”
Not really a topic of conversation the rest of the family wants to have around the Thanksgiving dinner table.
So we have this young man, now back in the United States, who will go on trial, a court martial, for murder. He might even get the death penalty. In his defense many point to his having to go to war four times in his career, the last time despite his resistance to go. He saw one of his friends severely wounded just the day before.
Not much of a defense though, since so many go on a third, fourth, fifth and even sixth deployment and see their friends horribly injured or killed. But isn’t it a serious and credible defense? When I first tried finding information on the Internets, “soldier kills civilians,” that search brought up one story after another of a military man killing a girlfriend or wife, or other loved one. Not just a few, but one after another, all around the U.S.
This man killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan isn’t an isolated event, not by a long shot. It’s happening all the time, not just in war zones. This happens in just about every state in the union. Young Marines, Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen kill those closest to them and it happens so often now, we don’t hear about it all the time. We hear about the sensational cases, like the Army major who killed 13 at Fort Hood in Texas.
This doesn’t even address the incidence of those who take their own lives. The Army Times reports 18 veterans commit suicide each day and over 900 attempt suicide per month. The number of veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is staggering, but it isn’t something anyone wants to talk about, not in the military at least and it gets very little play in the media. It’s not how we want to picture our “heroes.”
Here’s another little fact about veterans that doesn’t get much attention: unemployment and homelessness among veterans is over 30% and could be as high as 50%.
Our warriors killing civilians or themselves, whether in a war zone or here at home, will continue in these numbers until our government does something to address the psychological problems inherent in going to war. If the epidemic is ever addressed.
The common assumption about the military is it teaches veterans much about themselves and such values as teamwork, discipline and having a high work ethic. Maybe the military does all those things, but it also teaches our citizens, usually our youngest and most impressionable, to be killers. Seriously, if you’re in combat you can’t think about pulling that trigger, you just pull it. Your life and the lives of those around you depends on your instinctual reaction to shoot to kill. It’s how everyone in the Army and Marines are trained.
People can deny it all they want, but it’s a heavy burden and right now we do nothing to alleviate that suffocating weight foisted upon the people who fight in our name.
Will Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by a viable defense for that young soldier? Hard to say, but he will be tried at a court martial, judged by members of the military who were trained in the same system as him; men and women who serve the same master — the government. My guess is they won’t buy the PTSD defense because by doing so they are tacitly admitting the problem exists and right now the Pentagon is avoiding the subject. So the court will avoid the subject as well. It’s in their interest.
So, he will be judged a rogue soldier, an isolated incident, not the latest, most sensational example of a psychological epidemic. That will be yet another crime committed here. Thousands of veterans (and their families) will continue to suffer because the government will continue to ignore the problem, regardless of who is in the White House and which party controls government.
It’ just not the way we want to picture our heroes.
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