Pax Americana

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.