Higher Holier Living Hell

PTSD and other mental disorders at seventeen percent for US combat troops deployed to Iraq. That percentage will likely grow some with time.

Wilfred Owen, the young British officer who composed poems about (and was killed on) the Western Front during the Great War, knew a thing or two about combat stress and what it does to the human mind. As he wrote in "Mental Cases,"

These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.

Simply put, there is no way to convey the absolute nightmare that is combat. It is murder on a vast scale. The military tells you that it isn't but you know what murder is. Seeing a child torn to bits by machine-gun bullets is witnessing a murder. Even the killing of enemy soldiers is murder, and it often happens in ways too horrific to contemplate or describe. That they're trying to kill you, too, usually only provides temporary mental balm. That anyone can return to a normal life after experiencing a firefight is a testament to the amazing resiliency of the human animal; that many never can is all too understandable.

Most people associate PTSD with Vietnam vets: Here's an article from the National Center on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that has some telling data from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjusment Survey concerning rates of PTSD suffered by veterans of that war. However, PTSD has affected veterans of every war ever waged. Audie Murphy himself, the much-decorated hero of World War II and later movie star, suffered from memory of the multitudinous murders he had once witnessed.

But back to Iraq. Remember all of that "embedding" shit that the news networks went so ga-ga over? How they told you they were there "with the troops" and thought they were seeing all the action, and all of that other crap? Yeah. You didn't see any of this from the embedded reporters:

• One in four Marines surveyed reported killing Iraqi civilians.

• About one in five Army members surveyed reported engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

• More than 85 percent of those in Marine or Army combat units said they knew someone who had been injured or killed.

• More than half said they had handled corpses or human remains.

• More than 90 percent said they had been shot at.

• Nearly 20 percent said they saved someone’s life.

• More than 80 percent of Marines said they saw injured women and children who they had been unable to help.

Whoa! Hand-to-hand combat. Twenty percent of Army combat soldiers reported engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Boy, I'm glad those embedded reporters made us aware of that, aren't you? And don't think for a second that many of the 80% of Marines who saw wounded women and children, but were unable to help, don't see them every time they close their eyes.

Young men and women (and a few older ones, too) are being destroyed, both physically and mentally, in Iraq--and for what? Weapons of mass destruction? "Relationships" with al-Qaeda? FREEDOM (tm) for Iraqis? To protect our rights and freedoms? Obviously not.

It does not dishonor the troops, who do the very best that they can under excruciating circumstances, to point out that the people given charge of their lives callously deployed them into combat, and justified that move with a tapestry of lies. The leaders themselves are the ones who dishonor the soldiers, with their casual disregard for the welfare of the men and women they are entrusted to command.



Last night I had the strangest dream: the PNAC delusion of empire was fully shattered, lying in ruins in the sands of Mesopotamia. After Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and Perle and Cheney got their convictions handed down, part of their sentence involved acting as orderlies at VA hospitals--in the burn wards, the physical therapy units, the amputee wing, and the PTSD centers.