This Month

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090601_war_is_sin/

01 Jun 2009

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.

We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.

In the News:

Deadly shootings at Fort Hood

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8345713.stm

06 Nov 2009

A US Army major has opened fire on fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas, killing 13 people and injuring 30, officials say. It is not clear what motivated the attacker, named as 39-year-old military psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan. But some reports said the US-born Muslim was unhappy about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Maj Hasan is a military psychiatrist and was reportedly due to be sent on a mission to Iraq or Afghanistan. His cousin said Maj Hasan had been resisting such a deployment. "He hired a military attorney to try to have the issue resolved, pay back the government, to get out of the military. He was at the end of trying everything," Nader Hasan told Fox News. He also said that Nidal Malik Hasan had been battling racial harassment because of his "Middle Eastern ethnicity". Prior to Fort Hood, Maj Hasan served as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, which treats wounded troops from combat zones.

Military says mental wounds of war run deep

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/09/ap_military_mentalhealth_091609w/

Sep 16, 2009

Thousands of troops are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries and mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder. And the military is working to stem a rising number of suicides among troops. Recalling a meeting last year with a group of homeless veterans from the recent wars, Mullen said he worries about the rise of a new generation of transients like some who returned from the Vietnam War.

Carson Soldiers Say Iraq Horrors Led to Crimes

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/27-8

27 Jul 2009

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Soldiers from an Army unit that had 10 infantrymen accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after returning to civilian life described a breakdown in discipline during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered civilians, a newspaper reported Sunday. The unit was deployed for a year to Iraq's Sunni Triangle in September 2004. Sixty-four unit soldiers were killed and more than 400 wounded - about double the average for Army brigades in Iraq, according to Fort Carson. In 2007, the unit served a bloody 15-month mission in Baghdad. It's currently deployed to the Khyber Pass region in Afghanistan.Last week, the Army released a study of soldiers at Fort Carson that found that the trauma of fierce combat and soldier refusals or obstacles to seeking mental health care may have helped drive some to violence at home. It said more study is needed.

What it means when the US goes to war

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JF07Ak01.html

07 Jun 2008

The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearing apart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports have just informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in 2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides, as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraught veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they did to innocents in Iraq. American marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal.

Back from the war, forever transformed

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/11/MNGFMFMNV81.DTL

11 Nov 2005

Like veterans of many of America's wars, they have nightmares, they sometimes feel claustrophobic, and they are apprehensive about innocuous things -- freeway overpasses and traffic jams, for example. They feel alienated from the world they are re-entering and sometimes wonder if they're going a bit batty.

Veterans try talking about trauma

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4635075.stm

19 Aug 2005

War veterans suffering the psychological after-effects of combat often try to handle the problem themselves. Many end up abusing alcohol, drugs, or the goodwill of those closest to them. Air Force National Guardsman returned home in August 2004 from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq - to a hero's welcome. The next day, he shot himself in the head.

Combat Stress: As OId as War Itself

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4124558.stm

15 Aug 2005

Victims often find themselves having nightmares or being unable to sleep. In many cases, they have intrusive flashbacks to the events that caused the trauma. "They burn through their family and the goodwill of everyone they know, because there's no way a normal person can deal with PTSD. We're not trained for it. People have to part ways and its ugly," he says. And in the United States, tens of millions of people are affected, he says. "There are about 25 million veterans in America. Multiply 25 million veterans by their spouses, their surviving parents, their aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers - that's 100 million people."

War Takes Toll on Iraqi Mental Health

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4620279.stm

12 Aug 2005

The invasion of Iraq put an end to decades of repression under Saddam Hussein, but it also took a physical toll on the country, with hundreds of thousands killed or wounded. The war has also caused other wounds that are harder to detect, experts say. Children in particular are showing behavioral problems and depression at a higher rate than one would expect in a population this size - three times as high," Dr Yassiri says.

War swells US army divorce rate

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4075270.stm

08 Jun 2005

The number of US army officers getting divorced has soared in the past few years, the Pentagon says, a trend blamed on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004 the rate of divorce was more than three times as high as in 2002, figures showed. "The stressors are extreme in the officer corps, especially when we're at war," an army spokeswoman said. In another sign of strain on the army, it failed to meet its recruiting target for the fourth straight month.

Marine held after kidnapping, killing of Wal-Mart cashier

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/21/woman.abducted/index.html

21 Jan 2005

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