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Walking Wounded
By David Glenn Cox
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Winston Churchill wrote those words as a young lieutenant. He was in a Calvary charge where the men on either side of him were killed. It can be seen as the ultimate adrenaline rush in the most inhumane of sports.
Prohibition made the 1920s come to life but it was the thousands of combat veterans that really made it roar. How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris? How you gonna keep 'em working at the hardware store after they’ve had that adrenaline rush of gun play?
William Tecumseh Sherman observed that “War is hell” and modern war is even more so. Now we have high-powered, high-tech weaponry that increases the distance between friend and foe with the promise of an almost certain kill factor. Unless they miss, in which case the innocent die and the guilty live. Before WW1 it was unusual for civilians to become fatalities in combat. There are, of course, cases of atrocities but the general battle plan was for the armies to meet in a field somewhere outside of town.
In WW1 ten million soldiers died and seven million civilians died. In WW2 the numbers escalated to the point where they can only give a range of between fifty to seventy million dead and civilian deaths accounted for forty to fifty million. In Vietnam, villages were declared hostile and burned. In Iraq, Fallujah was declared hostile and was surrounded and then cleared house by house and civilian casualties weren’t even counted as the town was bombed and blocks were razed.
The increased lethality of war directs impact on the psychology of war. During WW2 the US Army determined that after thirty days on the line the combat efficiency of a unit declined. In WW2 one in six discharges were for combat fatigue. These were soldiers who had no bullet holes in them or visible scars of battle damage but soldiers whose minds were wounded just the same.
Combat soldiers develop a tough outer callus; they bond with the men around them and lose much of their respect for authority, military or otherwise. What was the most common crime for a WW2 G.I.? The army lost over 20,000 jeeps, lost, stolen or otherwise misplaced. When you live constantly in a life or death situation what can you do to sanction a soldier?
My uncle lived through four years of fighting in the South Pacific and when he went to school on the G.I. Bill he said, “When you live in the mud with people trying to kill you every day, homework or a term paper doesn’t seem like much of a challenge.” He was an outgoing and gregarious man, but his wife explained that he re-fought that war in the jungle every night for the rest of his life. For better or worse he was able to compartmentalize his experiences but was unable to exorcise them.
These horrible experiences cannot be removed from the minds of the young men that we send into combat. It is only one more reason that we must always measure the need for war against the damage by a loss of peace. Not just out of respect for the dead but because of the walking wounded who, like Manchurian candidates, come back and explode upon the innocent. My son had a friend from high school, just an all-American boy who joined the Army right out of high school.
Never been in any trouble, he was from a nice home and family. After three purple hearts and two tours in Iraq he returned home on leave. He had adapted to a combat lifestyle but could not adapt back to a peaceful one. He stayed with his parents for a day or two, then went on a month-long drinking binge. He got into fights and was arrested twice and released by compassionate judges due to his war record. The last time my son saw him he rode up on a stolen Harley-Davidson motorcycle and announced that he wasn’t going back to the Army.
He was later arrested and returned to Texas where he sits in the military stockade. It is obvious that this young man's fighting days are over and that what he needs is help, not prison. He is among the walking wounded; he has a psychological brain injury not unlike a concussion. His young mind was bombarded by horrible images and it adapted to that by trying to filter out the gore and feeding off the adrenaline. While living on the battle field he could cope but once returned to mom and apple pie his mind could no longer cope with killing experiences.
All across America are stories of Iraq veterans killing wives and girlfriends and even other veterans. The New York Times reported 121 cases where Iraq or Afghanistan veterans have been charged with a killing. This while the murder rate overall has declined and fewer soldiers are stationed in country, I’m old enough to remember these same stories from the Vietnam era. Combat veterans whose very lives depended on the ability to dispense violence on a moment’s notice returned home to live in a now alien world.
The Army says the same thing that it always says. Colonel Melnyk of the Department of Defense questioned the validity of comparing prewar and wartime numbers based on news media reports, saying that the current increase might be explained by “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” He also questioned the value of “lumping together different crimes" such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide.
“Given that many veterans rebound successfully from their war experiences and some flourish as a result of them, veterans groups have long deplored the attention paid to the minority of soldiers who fail to readjust to civilian life.”
He is saying it’s an unfair analysis because it’s not happening as you say it is and besides, since it doesn’t happen to most veterans, it should be ignored. Most people won’t catch the flu either but we spend a lot of money on prevention. I remember my uncle explaining that when the war ended his unit sat in an R & R camp for about a month because the war had ended suddenly and there were no plans for how to get the troops home quickly. Then they spent two weeks on a slow boat home where he and his fellow vets talked about what they would do when they got home.
There was time for decompression; many combat vets are in Iraq and Afghanistan on Monday and at mom’s house on Wednesday. My former brother-in-law was stopped in full fatigues returning home from Iraq because an airport security sniffer detected explosives on his clothes. Duh! I wonder why that is? Suddenly his rank and service meant nothing. “You got some 'splaining to do, boy.”
Families repeat the popular refrain, “He came back different.” Many vets are returned to civilian life with a rudimentary psychological evaluation and for some the demons don’t emerge until later. These men want to fit back in; they want their civilian life back but just don’t know how to return to it.
The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study found that 15% of veterans still suffered symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress a decade after their service. My father-in-law, a two tour Vietnam vet, once told me that the sound of helicopters still made his spine quiver and made him break out into a cold sweat.
The military and the VA have made genuine efforts to combat the problem, but there still remains the military culture that big, macho Marines or soldiers don’t cry and don’t whine. There is an answer; it is the same answer that we hear from right wing pundits in answer to social programs. The answer is to just say no, just say no to war. Just say if you break it, you buy it; that the military is just as liable for PTSD injuries as any other injuries. Maybe that means one or two less bombers or an aircraft carrier, but this debt must be paid to these vets, we owe it to them.
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