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TechnoratiAfter Fort Hood: Count All the Dead
Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Thursday's shoot-out at Fort Hood is that none of the 12 people who died in the melee will be counted as casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These soldiers - "brave Americans," President Obama called them - will join an unknown number of American soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines, who are not among the 5,267 the Defense Department counts as having died in our most recent wars, but who have perished nonetheless.
It will take days or weeks to learn what really happened at Fort Hood and why, but even at this early moment, we can make one statement for certain. The government's refusal to accurately count their sacrifice of these young men and women dishonors not only these soldiers' memories, but also obscures the public's understanding of the amount of sacrifice required to continue wars in two countries, simultaneously, overseas.
Go on the website, icasualties.org, which regularly publishes the names the Pentagon reports as having died in two wars, and a discerning eye will see a lot of other names are missing.
Missing are the names of service members, like Sgt. Gerald Cassidy, First Warrant Officer Judson E. Mount, or Spc. Franklin D. Barnett who died stateside after receiving substandard medical care for wounds sustained in the war zones. Cassidy sat dead in a chair for three days at Fort Knox before anyone noticed that he had passed away from complications related to a brain injury sustained in Iraq. Mount died in April 2009 at San Antonio's Brooke Army Medical Center after taking shrapnel from a roadside bomb in November 2008. Barnett died in June 2009 from wounds he sustained in Afghanistan earlier in the year.
Missing, too, are the names of American soldiers and veterans who have
killed themselves after serving a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, people
like 19 year old Spc. John Fish
of Paso Robles, California who told his superiors he was thinking of
killing himself after his first deployment, but was ordered overseas a
second Brian Randtime
anyway. While he was training for that second deployment to
Afghanistan, Fish walked out into the New Mexican desert after a
training exercise for his second deployment and blew his brains out
with a military issued machine gun. Or Sgt. Brian Jason Rand of
North Carolina, who was found under the Cumberland River Center
Pavilion near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in February 2008 with a bullet
through his skull and a shotgun by his side.
The Army reports 117 active duty Army soldiers killed themselves in 2007, the year Fish took his life. At the time, it was a 26-year high. But that record was quickly eclipsed by the 2008 Army figure of 128 suicides. In January 2009, more American soldiers committed suicide than died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, but none of these deaths are listed in the official casualty count.
Neither are the dozens of soldiers who have killed altercations with
law enforcement brought on by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder incurred
during deployments overseas - people like 19 year old Marine Corps veteran Andes Raya
who was shot dead by police in California's rural Central Valley after
returning home from Fallujah; or Minnesota Iraq war veteran Brian William Skold, who got drunk and then lead deputies Andres Rayaon
a late night chase before stepping out of his pick-up, firing a
birdshot into the air, before kneeling on one knee and leveling his
shotgun at authorities. Moments later he was fatally shot by two police
officers. It's unknown how many Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have
died this way, but like the 12 soldiers gunned down at Fort Hood this
week, their deaths would not have occurred if not for the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Regardless of what you think of these wars, it's absolutely necessary
that the American public be fully appraised of their cost. After all,
how can we even begin to honor their memories, if we don't even track
their sacrifice.
This piece originally appeared on New American Media.
15 Comments so far
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The New York Times
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November 8, 2009
When Soldiers’ Minds Snap
By ERICA GOODE
“Every man has his breaking point,” said military doctors in World War II, believing that more than 90 days of continuous combat could turn any soldier into a psychiatric casualty.
For Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who military officials said gunned down dozens of soldiers at Ft. Hood, Tex. on Thursday, that point may have come even before he experienced the reality of war; he was bound for a combat zone but had not yet embarked.
Major Hasan was being sent not to fight, but to join those ranks of doctors who, over centuries of war, have worried about breaking points — how much fear and tedium soldiers can take; how long they can slog through deserts or over mountains; how much blood they can see, how many comrades they can lose — and have sought ways to salve the troops’ psychic wounds and keep them fighting.
Much is unknown about Major Hasan’s motives. He is said to have dreaded deployment, but what he feared is unclear. And officials have not ruled out the possibility that his actions were premeditated or political. One report had him shouting something like “Allahu Akhbar” — Arabic for “God is Great” — before the shooting.
But even in this absence of certainty, his case invites a look at the long history of psychiatric medicine in war, if only because of his status as a battlefield psychiatrist, and the chance that his own psyche was, on some level, undone by the kind of stress he treated.
Over the centuries, soldiers have often broken under such stress, and in modern times each generation of psychiatrists has felt it was closer to understanding what makes soldiers break. But each generation has also been confounded by the unpredictability with which aggressions sometimes explode, in a fury no one sees coming.
The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have claimed more than their share of stress victims, with a rising number of suicides among soldiers and high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such casualties often occur not on the battlefield but after it — or, sometimes, merely in its proximity.
NY TIMES article continued
=============
In World War I, the disorder was known as shell shock, and the soldiers who fell victim were at first believed to have concussions from exploding munitions. Their symptoms appeared neurological: They included trembling, paralysis, a loss of sight or hearing.
Yet it turned out that some affected soldiers had been nowhere near an exploding shell, suggesting “that the syndrome could arise in anticipation of going into a stressful situation,” said Dr. Richard McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard and an expert on traumatic stress.
Some doctors devised methods to treat shell shock victims — one German doctor tried electroshock to the limbs. But there was also widespread suspicions that the soldiers were malingering. Some soldiers were shot for cowardice.
Yet shell shock was simply the Great War’s version of a reaction to combat that has been detected even in the writings of antiquity. Achilles, Jonathan Shay maintains in “Achilles in Vietnam,” (Scribner, 1994) displayed a form of traumatic stress when in the Iliad he grieves over the death of his friend Patroclus.
Soldiers in the Civil War suffered from irritability, disturbed sleep, shortness of breath and depression, a syndrome Jacob Mendes Da Costa, an Army surgeon, described in 1871 as “irritable heart.”
In World War II, the paralysis and trembling of the early 1900s did not recur. But nightmares, startled reactions, anxiety and other symptoms persisted as “battle fatigue” or “war neurosis,” a condition whose treatment was heavily influenced by the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Out of that war emerged a theory of battlefield treatment known as PIE, or proximity, immediacy and expectancy. The doctrine held that if a soldier broke down during combat, he should be treated close to the front, because if he was sent home, he would do poorly and seldom return to battle. Major Hasan, had he reached Iraq, would have practiced a similar approach: Soldiers are treated close to the forward lines and only removed to hospitals farther from the front in the most severe cases.
Today, the flashbacks, nightmares and other symptoms of soldiers are diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder or P.T.S.D., a term that replaced “post-Vietnam syndrome” and entered the official nomenclature in 1980, appearing in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual. Like its predecessors, the disorder has been easier to diagnose than it has been to understand or to treat.
Research has yielded some treatments that studies show help soldiers, and the military — now acutely aware of the problem — has taken steps to make the methods widely available. Yet the history of treatments for combat stress has often been a circular one, with experts “remembering and forgetting and remembering and forgetting but never integrating and creating a lasting narrative that could be a blueprint for going forward,” as one psychiatrist put it.
Similarly, scientific views of what makes soldiers susceptible to stress disorders have waxed and waned. Some experts, in a modern echo of a view put forward in World War II, argue that soldiers who develop P.T.S.D. have longstanding vulnerabilities — psychological or physiological — that make them unable to withstand the pressures of combat. Others assert, in agreement with the military doctors of World War I, that every soldier simply has a breaking point, and that multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have contributed to the numbers who return to a second, psychological war at home.
Yet no theory seems able to capture the unpredictable effects of sustained violence on human beings, the subtle pressures that years of killing and more killing exert on a soldier, a doctor or a society — or the reality that every war travels home with the soldiers who fight it.
“All these people have been under a tremendous amount of stress,” said Dr. Stephen Sonnenberg, a psychiatrist and adjunct professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, speaking of soldiers and those who treat them. “They are holding the stress for everybody.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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what is so disingenuous about such articles and such "treatments" and 'finding ways' is that the simple question:
"HOW DO YOU TREAT TRAUMA from wars?"
is answered simply:
DON"T MAKE WAR!!! STUPID!!
"In January 2009, more American soldiers committed suicide than died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined,..."
Is this a typo, or an ambiguously written statement? Can this be true?
They became casualties the moment they "signed up".
That is correct, at least in the mental and moral sense. While it is extremely difficult to overcome US military brainwashing, soldiers still have a legal and moral obligation to refuse to support these wars conducted for illegal reasons, and by illegal means, against civilian populations. Those who do conduct the wars are no better than the Manson family.
In hopes that the people in the military will read up on conscientious objection and exercise that option as human beings with spiritual core to cease and desist from engagement with the criminalized functions that inform the demands made on them.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.
A very good piece by Aaron Glantz!
How sad that America has come to this.
This Country is as bad as it get's. Anytime you have every politician and every war general denying the value of human life, this is you polished product.
My suggestion is that, if we admit that words are supposed to have meaning, one does not "honor" those soldiers because their lives were sacrificed to the idiocy of war. Instead they should be lamented for having been placed, most unnecessarily, in that position. Unfortunately, as is the wont of most Americans and especially those of the media and the politicians, they will try and say that these soldiers somehow died for a noble cause while never expressing sorrow that their deaths never should have occurred in the first place.
I realize this isn't the point of this article, but let's not leave out the thousands and thousands of Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani civilians who have ALSO died as a result of the US military juggernaut.
Actually that is very much to the point. One big reason these wars and their associated blowback, collateral damage, and mental and spiritual disintegration, are allowed to go on, is exactly that the powers that be are numb, heedless, or indifferent to the main cost of the wars.
History proves them again and again to be indifferent--just another external cost of doing business the Imperial way.
To all the above, exactly.
The most dangerous, most vile people in our nation reside in our congress and the white house.
What will it take to stop their madness?
Yes exactly! - I've been thinking the same thing all day. Our elite controllers must either be mad, or...are they just finding different ways to kill us all off?
Considering the situation humanity is in - overconsumption, resource depletion and climate change, we literally cannot afford to waste resources on wars - including economic exploitation - that are doing nothing but destroying lives all over the world.
Pull these troops out, cut the *defense* budget in half, and give them jobs building a sustainable infrastructure. How about if the US builds a rail system at least as good as Europe?
Every moment wasted on war is just impoverishing humanity that much more. For a sustainable future - start with stopping these horrible wars, and if enough people see it, it could happen.
Kitaj
Bravo! A comment written with intelligence and common sense.