Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
The Disappearance of War-Broken Soldiers
My earliest memory of a trip to the doctor is a happy one. I was 6 or 7. I had hurt my arm, and, because I desperately wanted a cast and a sling, I insisted it was broken. I remember that the doctor was kind, and he gently let me know that my arm was only sprained. Nevertheless, he wrapped it in a tan elastic bandage, and prescribed a sling for me. One of the reasons I loved that sling was its brown color. It was an Army sling. Because we were a military family, the hospital where Mom had taken me was Walter Reed.
For many years my associations with that complex of Georgian brick buildings in the far northwest of Washington were only positive. I grew up believing that military medicine is the best in the world, and that that was especially so in Washington. My father received comprehensive care in his last years at Malcolm Grow Medical Center at Andrews Air Force Base, and my elderly mother had a major operation at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The recent revelations of shoddy care offered to soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan at Walter Reed were doubly shocking to me. Last week, a special commission reported that those failures were the result of bureaucratic mismanagement, but I wondered -- was something else at work in the way those soldiers were treated?
Bethesda is the key. Around the time of my visit to Walter Reed, James Forrestal, recently retired secretary of Defense, was admitted to Bethesda as a patient, and I now understand his welfare was not the hospital's paramount concern. This was the spring of 1949, and tensions with the Soviet Union were running high. Forrestal had stoked those tensions, helping to put in place what might now be reckoned a paranoid foreign policy. That was why, when he had a psychological breakdown -- he was found catatonic in his Pentagon office, he was reported seen running through the streets in his pajamas crying "The Russians are coming!" -- the clinical paranoia of the secretary of Defense was treated as a national secret. When Forrestal was admitted to Bethesda, he was not assigned to the locked psychiatric ward on the first floor because of the questions that would raise. Instead, he was put in the unsupervised VIP suite on the 16th floor. May 22, he killed himself by jumping from the unbarred window of his bedroom.
No one at the Navy hospital wished Forrestal ill, but keeping his condition secret was more important than keeping him safe. So-called national security trumped patient health, which resulted in unacknowledged pressures on diagnosis and treatment. "Operational fatigue" was the condition which Navy doctors ascribed to Forrestal, establishing appearances that all he needed was a little rest. This concern for public perception led directly to tragedy. In the culture of neglect at today's Walter Reed, the commitment may be defined as a contrary one , since the object of public perception is not appearances, but disappearances. War-broken soldiers must disappear.
For reasons of national security -- namely, to shore up popular support for war policy -- the Defense Department has longed underplayed the tragic consequences of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Returning corpses (soon to number 4,000) are shrouded in secrecy. The suffering of the wounded (more than 26,000) is kept out of the nation's awareness. It is not that the medical professionals at Walter Reed are callous or uncaring. It is that the entire system is geared to making the men and women who carry visible signs of the war's cost slide back into the general population unnoticed. An inhospitable hospital serves that purpose. Mold infested walls of the Walter Reed housing units are the functional equivalent of unbarred windows at Bethesda.
Of all of the lies that the Bush administration has promoted, none is more egregious than that it "supports the troops." Unlike the others, that lie holds. In its name, Bush vetoed the war appropriations bill last week, as if the welfare of young and vulnerable soldiers is his chief concern. American soldiers are pawns in the game the president is playing with history. No longer capable of pretending that national security requires American presence in Iraq, Bush is simply refusing to acknowledge that what he did was wrong. He's like a child insisting that his arm is broken, when it isn't. In Bush's case, the fake dressing for which he longs are human lives.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2007 The Boston Globe
14 Comments so far
Show AllRemember Fabrizio Quattrocchi, that Italian who died in Iraq that brought Italy to a national uproar and generated a fierce debate over its support of the war (which ultimately ended in a withdraw)? One human life got that in Italy.
Soldiers are pawns?
Of course they are, that is what the pawns in chess represent!
To me the real irony is how people not only struggle to understand this point but even if they do they still fail to understand that to a government, the citizens, ALL of them, are also pawns to be used and discarded.
That's what government is.
S.
Add to that all the soldiers who died who are not counted, accidents, suicides. Bu$h, of course, doesn't do body counts of civilians. And what about those who died from their wounds after they returned? Do they count? What about those who are brain dead?
All these deaths are for no other purpose than to preserve Bu$h's political legacy, for what it's worth. They died for Bu$h's bullshit.
It's wrong to judge America's government in general by its worst example. Of any presidency ever, the Bush administration is undoubtedly the most corrupt, most disdainful of the law, and least sensitive to those whose lives it spends in pursuit of its imperial agenda. We want to hold Bush and his war criminal cronies accountable because we value government, not because government is the big evil to be done away with. That false claim is at the very heart of the neo-conning of the nation. We want to hold the Brownies of this pro-business, pro-war, anti-worker, anti-family, anti-environment, anti-education administration accountable because we can demand better from government because the government belongs to us. This land is our land, or have we forgotten? But, change will happen only if we start acting like citizens and not peons. The surest way to stay in debt peonage to the corporate war state is to embrace the attitude seen in S's post above, a cynical quietude that makes actual action impossible. The surest way to allow this unwarranted, illegal, and immoral war to continue is to act like pawns, when in fact if Americans got up off of their sofas and stopped sucking Big Gulps while they stare glaze-eyed at the boob tube they would discover that they are indeed powerful.
I wonder how different it could have been if George, Sr had not coddled his son out of military service? We blame George, Jr, but he learned what he was taught. No matter what service George, Sr. gave in the military -- George, Jr did not learn to respect those who serve as being worthy of time, energy, care, dollars, and grief for every death/casualty created by his decisions.
Perhaps if he had really served in the military he might have had a clue about the realities of war. Of course, that is once again assuming he is human, which we all know is not the case.
Pawns, that is what they are for a man that was AWOL for his service in the Guard, got a DUI and did a tad to much cocaine, let alone ditching the draft. Back in the 60's the rich white boys always had Dady take care of them, Bushies did quite well for themselves! Wars, seem to help make them rich.
Ok, guys, I am angry and proud of it.
"support the troops" needs a careful examination by anyone who truely values the different meanings of words and their context depending on who is speaking them. one meaning is "moral" support - letting them know you care for their wellbeing. who doesn't feel this kind of support? another meaning is "financial" - are we committed to an unending flow of money into the pit of war? those who argue for war want it to appear as if supporting troops automatically means both moral and financial. it is the responsibility of war opponents to point out that this is false. one can definitely give moral while withholding financial support. war proponants like to say that is hypocrisy or irrational. but conflating two distinct meanings into their use of one word is either diabolically evil or just plain stupid - or maybe both.
"He's like a child insisting that his arm is broken, when it isn't. In Bush's case, the fake dressing for which he longs are human lives."
Really James, wonderful setup, but I would have made the last sentence:
"We have diagnosed Bush's irrational paranoia of WMD, but by pretending that it wasn't insanity, we are just chucking our troops out the window."
When I got back from Nam, I had the opportunity to join a "street program" - otherwise known as a drop in counseling center, crisis hotline and free medical clinic. I can tell you from direct experience that these brave troops that were broken from war do not just disappear. They slip them back into the general population knowing that there will be divorces, substance abuse, and other problems directely related to war trauma. Then they end up homeless. There is no greater outrage about war than our vets ending up on the street homeless. We are not owning the carnage we started. The concept of homeless in America is a concept of disposable human beings. When is comes to that, there can be no disposable veterans. They served their country in good faith and we need to serve them in good faith.
When it comes to that, Bush and Cheney need to become disposable.
TNT - Nice post. It's easy to get too angry, too cynical. We shouldn't forget that somewhere in this murky bathwater there's a baby.
I guess what makes me shake my head is that there is nothing in this article that is new. This information and worse has been sent to our members of Congress since shortly after the war started-BUT-all of a sudden its a f**g revelation.
If the military famlys are not complaining in public then Congress is too lazy or distracted to act. When I lived in the U.S. I used to listen to talk shows and I never heard a military family member complain about the war or medical treatment.
Drex is right. The military and their families have a great deal of power, as evidenced by the Walter Reed scandal. If they were to unite and speak out, they could put the lie to this nonsense about "supporting the troops" in no time flat. It seems they're victims of the Stockholm syndrome.