Anyone who wants to understand the true cost of freedom should read this report in The New Yorker under the byline of Dan Baum.
Its subject: how our military personnel must shed their deeply-held inhibitions towards killing others, even when the targets are the enemy, and how the burden of killing falls on their shoulders alone, with insufficient preparation or support. Fascinating, and sobering.
Since Vietnam, the Army has not had to dwell on how soldiers are affected by the killing they do. The first Gulf War was very short, and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were largely fought from long range, with airpower and artillery, which rendered the killing abstract. In the current Iraq war, though, soldiers are killing with small arms on battlefields the length of a city block. Exactly how many Iraqis American forces have killed is not known—as General Tommy Franks said, “We don’t do body counts”—but everyone agrees that the numbers are substantial.Major Peter Kilner, a former West Point philosophy instructor who went to Iraq last year as part of a team writing the official history of the war, believes that most infantrymen there have “looked down the barrel and shot at people, and many have killed.” American firepower is overwhelming, Kilner said. He ran into a former student in Iraq who told him, “There’s just too much killing. They shoot, we return fire, and they’re all dead.” Even some of the most grievously wounded Iraq-war veterans seem more disturbed by the killing they did than they are by their own injuries. I spent a week in December among amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the subject changed to the killing they’d done, a pall would settle over them.
Kilner and a number of observers inside and outside the Army worry that the high rate of closeup killing in Iraq has the potential to traumatize a new generation of veterans. Worse, they say, the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs avoid thinking or talking about it. Although both organizations have produced reams of studies on every other aspect of combat trauma—grief, survivor’s guilt, fear, and so on—the aftereffects of taking an enemy’s life are almost never studied. “The blind spot in the scholarship is glaring,” said MacNair, whose book “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing” is devoted, in part, to soldiers. “I kept thinking there must be a huge amount of research on this that I’m missing, but I never found it.” Lieutenant Colonel Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, an Army psychiatrist based in Bethesda, has called killing “the dead elephant in the living room that nobody wants to talk about.”
Tip via the weekly e-mail from Jonathan V. Last, online editor of The Weekly Standard, who said:
We have a devastatingly effective, all-volunteer army that is more lethal than any other force in history. But then these men need to come home, turn off the mechanisms that allow them to kill, and integrate back into society. It's a hard circle to square.There is, however, something hopeful about the very idea of Baum's article: It says something very good indeed about a society that produces volunteer soldiers who hate killing. I'd feel a lot more better about the future if MEMRI or LittleGreenFootballs unearthed an article from a Middle Eastern journal about a similar reluctance on the part of our Islamist foes.
That is indeed the contextual silver lining, but the dark cloud is still there too: America does not provide what its veterans need and deserve. One would think a veteran could run for President or something on that platform...
Posted by Alan at August 7, 2004 07:30 AM