Pax Americana

Do Or Die

AP:

Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Henderson, a strapping Iraq combat veteran, spent the last, miserable months of his life as an Army recruiter, cold-calling dozens of people a day from his strip-mall office and sitting in strangers' living rooms, trying to sign up their sons and daughters for an unpopular war.

He put in 13-hour days, six days a week, often encountering abuse from young people or their parents. When he and other recruiters would gripe about the pressure to meet their quotas, their superiors would snarl that they ought to be grateful they were not in Iraq, according to his widow.

Less than a year into the job, Henderson — afflicted by flashbacks and sleeplessness after his tour of battle in Iraq — went into his backyard shed, slid the chain lock in place, and hanged himself with a dog chain.

He became, at age 35, the fourth member of the Army's Houston Recruiting Battalion to commit suicide in the past three years — something Henderson's widow and others blame on the psychological scars of combat, combined with the pressure-cooker job of trying to sell the war.

The mind toll of our wars is tremendous and the tragedy continues to compound itself.  I can't imagine the trauma, nor the act of committing suicide, but sometimes pain exceeds resources, especially when we don't provide enough support for our returning troops.

Beyond the real human consequences for people I don't know--not to mention the few times I've personally been impacted by suicide--this story got me thinking about the larger philosophical significance of killing oneself in the context of war.  I also thought about suicide as a deliberate act of resistance.

One famous example of mass suicide as defiance against an opposing force is the Masada.

[T]he Romans...finally [breached] the wall of the fortress with a battering ram...When they entered the fortress, however, the Romans discovered that its 936 inhabitants had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and committed mass suicide rather than face certain capture, defeat, slavery or execution by their enemies.

The account of the siege of Masada was related to Josephus by two women who survived the suicide by hiding inside a cistern along with five children, and repeated Elazar ben Yair's exhortations to his followers, prior to the mass suicide, verbatim to the Romans. Because Judaism strongly discourages suicide, Josephus reported that the defenders had drawn lots and killed each other in turn, down to the last man, who would be the only one to actually take his own life. Josephus says that Eleazar ordered his men to destroy everything except the foodstuffs to show that the defenders retained the ability to live, and so chose the time of their death over slavery...

That story was brought to mind when considering Gandhi's oft-criticized suggestion of what European Jews should have done during WWII (as recounted by Louis Fischer in Gandhi and Stalin):

"I [do] not believe in passive resistance.  Satyagraha is something very active.  It is the reverse of passive.  Submission is passive and I dislike submission.  The Jews of Germany made the mistake of submitting to Hitler."
...
"Hitler," Gandhi solemnly affirmed, "killed five million Jews.  It is the greatest crime of our time.  But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife.  They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.  I believe in hari-kiri.  I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method."
...
"[That] would have been heroism.  It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler's violence, especially in 1938, before the war.  As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."

There were probably other forms of resistance that Jews and Europeans could have employed, but Gandhi's motto was "do or die" and as I've noted before, he even advocated the unthinkable:

[N]on-violence has to be non-violence of the brave and the strong. It must come from inward conviction. I have, therefore, not hesitated to say that it is better to be violent if there is violence in our breasts than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. Violence is any day preferable to impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent.

The Mahatma hated impotence and passivity even more than violence.  Suicide is, at the very least, active--doing and dying.

I don't think the recruiters who have killed themselves are doing so for any political reason, any other reason than ending their pain. There obviously are issues they faced deeper than just trying to sign up more cannon fodder, but in the end their actions can give the rest of us pause, providing space to consider the morality of recruiting and training people to kill, die, suffer lasting physical and mental wounds.  A final sacrifice we should honor.

ntodd

Defend Our Constitution Arrest Bush and Cheney War Criminals

So sayeth the Veterans For Peace people Hecate met...

ntodd

Armistice Day

Atrios likes to say "meanwhile, over there..." meaning Iraq.  Sadly, our Forgotten War (that Obama unfortunately wants to ramp up) continues to produce a body count: a record 258 troops KIA, countless Afghans killed by our forces. 

Then there is the aftermath.  Afghanistan vets are returning home to end up without a home.

It's great that there are social networking sites springing up to help our veterans, but the best way to support them is to end their wars and give them what they need when they return.  Even though #44 is still too beholden to the military industrial complex, I do still hold out hope that he will treat our returning troops the way they deserve and not as they've been treated over the last 8 years.

Would that there really were a war to end all wars...

ntodd

Another man gone

This is Coleman Bean, a veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, who took his own life on September 6,2008. It's the usual PTSD story we've heard all too many times. I didn't know him personally, but for some reason I can't get him off my mind. He was a Jersey guy. His father is the editor of the local free paper that lands in my mailbox every week. I always read that paper, because it's got the best coverage of the Long Branch, NJ eminent domain fight that's been going on around here for years now.  Also, there is a liberal vs. conservative point-counterpoint column every week, and his father Greg does a good job representing the liberal point of view.  So I was shocked to see what had happened to his son. Maybe because he's the editor, the obituary is quite lengthy and frank and talks about things you don't usually see in the typical soldier obit, which often glorifies the dead, without asking if this person really needed to die. So I'll just let the piece speak for itself.

In the early hours of the next morning, the family would learn, Coleman got into a one-car accident in West Long Branch, was hospitalized briefly, returned home to his apartment in South River and shot himself. His family and friends would react with shock and sadness, and also with anger that he would leave them this way.

Greg Bean's anger is also directed at the U.S. Army. After Coleman returned from nearly a year in Iraq in 2004, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for issues including extreme anxiety attacks and depression. Despite the diagnosis, the Army sent him back to the war in 2007.

"He had gone to the V.A. and seen a bunch of people [at] the Lyons campus. … He was diagnosed with PTSD and some other troubling issues, just lingering issues from Iraq," his father said. "The problem is that the V.A. doesn't really have anything to do directly with the Army. When he got called back, the Army said, 'Well, we don't care what the V.A. says about you. If you want a deferment from that, you have to get it from an Army psychiatrist.' "

Coleman feared that if he went to an Army psychiatrist, he'd spend the next deployment cleaning latrines or some other unwanted duty.

"The fact that he was diagnosed with [PTSD] didn't have any impact on him being deployed a second time. I think that's wrong. I think that's horrible that a soldier could be seeing a Veterans Administration doctor and that carries no weight with our Army," Greg said.

After serving again in Northern Iraq through much of 2007 and early 2008, he returned home in May. He began working with his brother Nick at a Web publishing business, and was learning to do IT work. Coleman may have pursued that as a career, and he was also considering taking college courses, his father said.

But as Coleman was deciding what to do, there also remained the possibility of a third deployment. Greg said the Army had the ability to again call his son back until November, and the looming possibility clouded his future direction.

When Coleman took his life, he became the latest in an overwhelming number of veteran suicides. The suicide rate among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan was 141 between 2002 and 2005, but was 113 in 2006 alone, the last year for which records are available, according to news reports.

In the same issue of the paper, Coleman's uncle also had something to say. His letter to the editor ends this way:

At the memorial service, one of Coleman's brothers said that when the three brothers went out, they would always drink a toast "To the way things should be." Rather than toasting to the way things should be, we as a country need to act to make this the way it should be. End the war in Iraq. End the multiple deployments. Treat these returning soldiers with the respect and care they deserve. Here's to Coleman, and the way things should be.

I thank the Bean family for their courage in speaking honestly about this tragedy, and hope that we soon won't have to be reading these stories anymore.

Working so hard like a soldier

(X-posted at A Blog Named Sue)

One of the many applause lines in Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention last night came when she said her husband would work to make sure health benefits - including mental health benefits - would be extended to all veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. That would no doubt help stem the epidemic of suicides currently afflicting veterans returning from Iraq, but any plan to ease wounded soldiers' transition from military care to Veterans Administration/civilian care must include an overhaul of the way soldiers apply for and recieve their benefits.

As Linda Bilmes and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Steiglitz point out in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, a disabled veteran bears the entire burden of proving to the Veterans Administration that he or she is not only disabled but that the disability occurred as a result of his or her active duty in the United States military - and this is often after that veteran has spent several months before discharge being treated by the military for that very same disability! (That's an NPR interview with Bilmes on the other end of that link; the transcript is unavailable, but take a few minutes to listen to it - it's astonishing.) Veterans must gather all appropriate documentation from every medical professional involved in their treatment and present it to the VA in order for their claims to be processed. This is a paper-based system, and as you can imagine it is currently overloaded. As of March, the date of the NPR interview with Bilmes I link to above, this process took about six months. If there is an error, or the veteran in question wishes to appeal the VA's decision for whatever reason, the process stretches out to two years. Two years is a hell of a long time to ask someone suffering from severe PTSD to wait for treatment; is it any wonder we're seeing record suicide rates among soldiers returning from Iraq?

Bilmes recommends that we switch to a system similar to the one employed by Canada and Great Britain; in those systems, the veteran's claim is assumed to be genuine and the burden of proving otherwise, if necessary, falls to the government. It's basically the same system the IRS uses here in the States - as Bilmes points out, the vast majority of tax claims are assumed to be genuine and a only a small subset of claims gets audited in order to discourage fraud. In other words, returning veterans' disability claims should be given at least as much credibility as Dick Cheney's tax return.

That's a brilliant first step, and I'd recommend an additional reform: in our information age, in which TRW has a record of every time I've scratched my ass during the past five years, it couldn't be too difficult to establish a paralell electronic service record between the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration that begins the moment a volunteer musters in to the service. That way, the VA would already have all of the records it needs to process a veteran's claim on the day he or she is discharged from the service.

With all the talk recently about United States troops withdrawing completely from Iraq by 2011, now is the time to lay the groundwork for an improved system that will help those returning soldiers re-integrate into civilain life as smoothly as possible.

Peace Is Patriotic

VFP in DC denied a spot in the National Memorial Day Parade.

ntodd

Those are people who died

The epidemic of suicides among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts appears to be reaching a crisis point, as testimony is set to begin in a class-action lawsuit against the Veterans Administration for failing to provide more and better psychiatric care. Internal VA e-mails obtained by the plaintiffs say an average of eighteen veterans kill themselves each day. A RAND Corporation study found that an additional one thousand veterans attempt suicide every month. Clearly, the system currently in place simply can't deal with the sheer numbers of veterans whose psyches have been torched and gutted during their service in our mismanaged war in Afghanistan and our completely elective mismanaged war in Iraq. Returning veterans must navigate an incredibly labyrinthine process in order to claim any benefits; I've been clinically depressed myself (obviously, not to the degree that these returning veterans are) and I can tell you that paperwork is the last thing you're capable of dealing with when you're in that state. That's something I plan on writing about in more detail later on.

Right now, I want to touch on something I've written about before: human beings are simply not designed for war. I'm way too much of a misanthrope to have any illusions about human nature; it's clear that the default setting for much of our race is 'douchebag.'  But 'douchebag' is a far cry from ruthless killing machine.'  We have to be goaded, perverted into a warlike state, with promises of wealth or increased social status or threats of being cast out from the herd. One of the stated goals of military training is to tear down the recruit, to short circuit his human nature so he becomes able and willing to commit violence against strangers on the order of another stranger. Of course, the enemy too is dehumanized to the soldier (and, via propaganda, to the citizen) in order to make his death more palatable and less troubling. Arguably, this is done to make the soldier better able to survive the nightmare that is the modern battlefield.

The only problem is that it doesn't seem to work. Thich Nhat Hanh, no stranger to the reality of war, writes that military training designed to strip both the soldier and the enemy of their humanity will necessarily result in atrocities like Abu Ghraib, because "Preparing for war and fighting a war means allowing our human nature to die." But our human nature can't die as long as we remain alive, and it seems to come squirreling out of us from the weirdest places and in the weirdest ways and the next thing you know you've woken up in a cold sweat holding the gun you keep under the pillow and holy shit when did you start keeping a gun under your pillow?

Eighteen people a day lose the struggle to reconcile what they've become with what they once were. Another twelve thousand people each year succumb as well, but for the grace of whatever they believe or maybe only because of dumb luck they survive to struggle on. There are no half-time show salutes to honor those who survive their PTSD and the ones who die are not counted among the honored dead and their names will never be carved on a monument. Remember this the next time anyone tells you to be "realistic" and accept that war is "inevitable" and it's all just "human nature."

(x-posted at A Blog Named Sue)

You Blanks

The problem with opposing this war--and I think NTodd will back me up on this--is that it's so goddamn emotional. There's no way to watch what's going on, to stand against it, to care about the people it affects, without feeling like you're screaming into the void at least half the time.

I encounter on a daily basis dozens of people who should be on fire to end the war, but they shrug and go on with their lives as though it's not real, even though some of them have lost friends, or are struggling themselves to cope with the effect of their service has had on their lives. Some days are better than others, for them and me, and some really, really suck a lot. One student of mine, bright, serious, attentive, has disappeared altogether. You hope it's their work schedule; you fear it's not.

And then there's this:

Last Monday, November 26, Sammantha Owen-Ewing, one of IVAW's newest members, the wife of my friend Scott, and a former Army medic like me, committed suicide in her Rhode Island home. Sammantha was only 20 years old, and in that short time had been an Army medic training to become a nurse while stationed at Walter Reed, then became a patient herself in Walter Reed's mental health ward. In June, she married Scott Ewing, also an IVAW member, and was discharged from the Army. Despite an uphill battle to receive care from the VA, things seemed to be looking up; she was getting settled into life in Rhode Island, planned to continue her medical career, and was becoming active in Iraq Veterans Against the War. Although most of us were never fortunate enough to know Sammantha, she was one of us and we mourn her passing.

This young woman (20. Jesus fuck.) was a medic stationed at Walter Reed, and she lost it. (I've read this a couple of times, and it doesn't look to me like she was overseas; correct me if you see something I don't.) This is a whole other level of repercussion that we haven't even considered: the ongoing effect of the war for people who work with vets.

I watched a film the other day that came highly recommended to me, based on books Santa ordered for me for Christmas. The Regeneration trilogy is a fictionalized account of the work of W.H.R. Rivers, a sort of non-libidinal Freudian analyst who worked at Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Scotland during World War I. (I'm mentioned his work briefly before, and we've had some terrific debates about treatment of PTSD in the current clinical climate, which is overwhelmingly based on chemical management.) Rivers was a brilliant man, deeply conflicted because his job, such as it was, was to make men well enough to die. He was supposed to cure what was then called "war neurosis" (more commonly and less scientifically known as "shell shock," the colorful old grandpa of our PTSD) among officers, who, generally speaking, were well-educated members of the lower gentry.

One of those young men was a passionate, brilliant, bitter young man named Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon didn't have war neurosis. Instead, he was sent to Craiglockhart because he was a peace activist.

One more time: he was sent to a mental hospital because he had turned against the war.

He had supported it, early on. He was one of those peaches-and-cream, eager young patriots who drank greedily from the fountain of Rupert Brooke and willingly put their lives on the line for The Cause. Sassoon lost a close friend in battle, but this only increased his military fervor, until he began to see that the Germans were as much dupes as he had been, and that the real fault lay with the generals sitting in comfort, who had no real reason to end the war. And he turned bitter.

His friend Robert Graves, also a poet (and who would go on to write the I Claudius novels), was worried that Sassoon's activism would end him in jail, or, worse yet, executed for treason. So he fought to get Sassoon sent to Craiglockhart to save his life. Sassoon was not, generally speaking, grateful for this intervention, since it essentially defined pacifism as a mental illness. Still, being at Craiglockhart was safer than being deployed, and meeting the other victims of the war, young men who had been deeply damaged, strengthened his resolve. Most famously, he encouraged another young man with a literary bent to apply his gifts to his war experience: that young man was Wilfred Owen, who unfortunately did recover enough to be sent back to the lines and was killed scant days before the Armistice. This, uh, did not decrease Sassoon's bitterness, for obvious reasons.

But Rivers, according to several accounts, also began to be affected by his work. Psychoanalysis does contain an expectation that the patient and analyst will become intertwined to some extent: on the patient's side, this is called transference, on the doctor's counter-transference. Rivers' counter-transference, the level to which he absorbed the horror of the experiences his patients brought to him, making such experiences his own,  gave him some of the same symptoms as his patients. I expect one can't really thrive on a constant diet of demons. (Once the war was over, he did a lot better.)

Which brings us back to Sammantha Owen-Ewing. I don't know why she died, what was in her mind to convince her that it just wasn't worth it anymore. But like W.H.R. Rivers, she lived and worked among the suffering, and her tragically short life was indelibly marked by what she saw. I mourn her as another victim of this stupid fucking war which has to end, and I despise anyone who encourages sending more young people to their deaths, whether by IED or trauma.

All my songs used to end the same way.
"Everything's gonna be okay."
You fuckers make that impossible to say.