Bob Herbert had a heartbreaking Op-Ed piece in the NYT this morning. He wrote of the incredible and overwhelming number of young men and women who are suffering serious mental and psychological problems due to repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just last week John Russell, a 44-year old Army sergeant who had been recognized as deeply troubled and was on his third tour in Iraq, went into the counseling center on the afternoon of May 11 and opened fire -- killing an Army officer, a Navy officer and three enlisted soldiers. The three enlistees were 19, 20 and 25 years old.
As Herbert says, this is what happens in wars. Wars are about killing and once the killing is unleashed it takes many, many forms. Which is why it's so sick to fight unnecessary wars and so immoral to send other people's children off to wars -- psychic as well as physical -- from which one's own children are carefully protected.
The destructive effects of war in Iraq and Afghanistan should not have surprised anyone. Speaking of Iraq back in 2004, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who had been an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, said, "I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of the war."
Because we have chosen not to share the sacrifices of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrible burden of these conflicts is being shouldered by an obscenely small portion of the population. Since this warrior class is so small, the same troops have to be sent into the war zones for tour after harrowing tour.
As the tours mount up, so do the mental health problems. Combat is crazy-making to start with. Multiple tours are recipes for complete meltdowns, Herbert writes and I couldn't agree more.
The RAND Corporation reported in a study released last year, that not only is a higher proportion of the armed forces being deployed, but deployments have been longer, redeployment to combat has been common, and breaks between deployments have been infrequent. Recent attempts by the military to deal with aspects of deployment policies have amounted to much too little, much too late. The same Rand study found that approximately 300,000 men and women who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan were already suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression. That's nearly one in every five returning veterans. Many of these stories of violence, drunkenness, broken homes and suicides never make there way into print. The public that professes such admiration and support for our fighting men and women really aren't that interested in the dirty details.
We are brutally and cold-bloodedly sacrificing the psychological well-being of these men and women, which should be a scandal. If these wars are so important to our national security, we should all be engaging in some form of serious sacrifice and many more of us should be serving.
But as Herbert says, the country soothes its conscience and tamps down it's guilt with the cowardly invocation: "Oh, they're volunteers. They knew what they were getting into."
