December 13, 2006

• I remember hearing this exact same stuff going on after Operation Desert Storm wound up. Does that mean the military hasn't learned anything in the last fifteen years? "When I'm dealing with Alex Orum's personal problems on a daily basis, I don't have time to train soldiers to fight in Iraq. I have to get rid of him, because he is a detriment to the rest of the soldiers." So give them an honorable discharge and find them the help they need, or ship them elsewhere, get them the help they need, and send them back to their superior officer. Bloody hell. Sucky military policy.
• But if you oppose the war, you're accused of not "supporting the troops".
• Why would killing unarmed civilians cause any red-bloody soldier mental anguish? This isn't about human beings, this is about ______________!* *fill in the blank
• Forgive me if this is getting a bit soapboxy, and though it sounds as though I'm providing a justification for the behavior on the part of the military leadership, I'm merely saying the following by way of explanation. We have a military, and it provides several vital services to the nation, not the least of which is deterrent against potential military attack on us. That said, the purpose of every military force is that by threat or actualization of the use of deadly force on a large scale, they affect a change that is deemed politically necessary. Generally the means of this is going out to some country and making lots of people dead. And confronting lots of people that want to make them dead. There are simply people who cannot psychologically cope with the situation of constant danger, constant discipline, and constant making people dead, and those people have no place in a theater of conflict. Furthermore, they have no place in the military which, as stated above, exists for the purpose of going out and making lots of people dead at the risk of being made dead. Harassment, camaraderie, belittling, the tearing-down of independent will and one's very psyche to be replaced by rote obedience, with extremely limited trade space for creativity and individuality --- all of these are the necessary aspects of the creation of people who, provided the proper aptitude, can handle the danger, the harassment, and the making of lots of dead people on the other side. As an aside, I have no illusions about my fitness for military life. I've neither the fortitude to tolerate the hazing nor the flexibility to not tell some superior, in as polite terms as I can muster, that they're full of shit. If I were put into a theater of combat, I would be a danger as much to my comrades as any enemy. So I chose another career path. Furthermore, the very purpose of the military makes it, by necessity, generally inured to the state of anyone's feelings -- a rapid medical discharge followed by treatment in a non-military setting is what is needed. I submit that it's not the military's job to treat people who, for one reason or another break under the circumstances of their service, and it is best for both the services and the soldiers that they are separated from one another as quickly and permanently as possible when a soldier is unable to continue making people dead or deal with people trying to make them dead. They need treatment, they need help, and the military is not and should not be involved in the process. Also, however, except in extremis, the military services should take a much, MUCH stricter tack on determining the psychological fitness of people before putting them in physical and psychological harm's way. There will always be people who get PTSD, but a better screening program will aid the soldiers and make for a more effective military. 20-25% of soldiers having psychological trauma from their service is a pathetic statistic -- the onus is on the military's leadership to take a more jaundiced eye toward the combat-fitness of far more soldiers than they currently do. I'm sure that being told "you can't go to the theater of action because you're unfit for combat" is far, far less psychologically traumatic than when, in the heat of killing and maybe dying they break, hard and for good.
• To paraphrase: It's necessary that we take a portion of our nation's youth and maim them psychologically so that they will kill for their government, for reasons which may or may not be justifiable, which may or may not ever even be honestly evaluated. That's just the way it is because it, uh, is, so if you can't stand the heat of making omelettes stay out of where they're breaking a few eggs. IMHO: unacceptable.
• Are you seriously telling me that taking a group of people, schooling them in the most efficient and effective methods of killing people, and subsequently subjecting them to the reality of killing and the threat of imminent death or dismemberment isn't going to maim a portion of them psychologically? If you're speaking from a philosophical opposition to war and killing people for political purposes, I'm right there with you. But granted that, yeah, it's just the way it is that groups of people with startling frequency decide they want to go over somewhere and kill a bunch of other people, I fail to see how it is possible to prevent the proverbial breakage of eggs. And to extend the metaphor, the chef (read: military leadership) should do a better job of keeping the people more susceptible to psychological harm away from where the eggs are being made. Or did you just completely ignore the entire first paragraph of my post above wherein I disclaimed any attempt at justification?
• Furthermore, I would submit that the stated outcome of boot camp, namely unquestioning obedience and the start of an acceptance that killing people is OK when the President says so is a psychological injury of its own.
• Well at least the rich fat white guys in Washington are getting richer and fatter. That's all that matters, after all.
• chimaera - There's a serious problem that reasoning (which I realise you are not advocating): the vast majority of people react as these soldiers have. Some do sooner, some later, some more, some less, but war affects just about everyone mentally, as with any violence. I remember Dreadnought telling me that a large number of prison camp officers in the Holocaust ended up committing suicide. These were men who weren't even subjected to poor conditions, just inflicting them on others. But human psyches are not able to handle the way we like being bastards to each other. And the few people who aren't affected at all? I would suspect they are psychopaths, or at least have psychopathic tendancies. And that is exactly the type of person that should not be fighting our wars.
• Hasn't the military learned anything in the last 15 years? Hell, try the last 500 years. No, it hasn't, because it, the organisation, doesn't care. Creating an army has always been about brainwashing a bunch of people to become thugs, mutilating them psychologically so that they can kill on command, but never undo that damage (because you can't). And every generation in the military comes away with psychological damage to one degree or another - especially if they see action. Depressive illness, PTSD, basic ingrained brutality, birdbrained nationalistic claptrap beliefs; hosts of other problems. Same happened to the guys coming back from WW2, Korea & Vietnam. Every other war you can mention. The army leadership & the government don't give a fuck, because these people are just cannon fodder, slaves; they're just to be used up & nobody gives a damn about the human toll. Why is anyone surprised? These people will be thrown away, either in battle, or afterwards when they are no longer useful, like so much trash. This talk of honour & duty, & respecting the service given by the people of the armed forces is so much lip-service hogwash to assuage the minds of the masses. The people in charge don't believe that shit. It's always been like that. As long as you entertain the concept of employing a military force, that is always how it is going to be, because the concept is primitive & brutal & doesn't belong in a rational civilization. We do not have a rational civilization, we have a deeply broken, malfunctioning one. Our values are all fucked up. Astounds me that people still wonder at the treatment vets get, haven't they cottoned-on to the routine, yet? People are surprised? And it's gonna be like this for a long time yet, long time.
• Steady, jb: we've seen some disgraceful episodes, but I think equating your average US soldier with a Holocaust prison camp officer might still be reckoned a little controversial: and 'psychopath' is a word to be used with extreme care, I believe. Soldiers, you know, are pretty ordinary folks really, not zombies who have been reduced to mindless obedience and stripped of all decent human feelings. Whether you be pro- or anti-war I reckon you ought to want them to get decent support and help, and that's the real point of the thread. IMO.
• > And the few people who aren't affected at all? I would suspect they are psychopaths, or at least have psychopathic tendancies. There's the rub. If you exclude everyone from combat groups who has the potential to suffer PTSD, you'll end up with (1) an insufficient number of people ready for combat (2) a preponderence among those ready for combat of specific psychological profiles, some of which are undesirable.
• but I think equating your average US soldier with a Holocaust prison camp officer might still be reckoned a little controversial: and 'psychopath' is a word to be used with extreme care, I believe. I'm sorry to say, darling, that I think you've missed the point of jb's comment. She's not saying that US soldiers in Iraq are morally equivilant to concentration camp guards, she's merely pointing out that killing people is traumatising, whether or not you're in danger of being killed yourself. Indeed, a vanishingly small percentage of the population will kill willingly and without compunction, and a good percentage of those people (although not all) are sociopaths. This is where I think chimaera and Chyren are also incorrect. a) the military doesn't train people to become cold-blooded merciless killers. It trains people to fight wars in the full knowledge that many of them will be subject to physical and psychological injury. b) it is almost impossible to assess, ahead of time, the degree to which a person will be psycholocigally wounded by combat or by killing. We simply don't know enough about it. All we know is that it almost inevitably happens to some extent. c) By en large, militaries feel responsible for, and invest a great deal of time and resources, into taking care of the wounded. In our culture, wounded soldiers are not trash to be thrown away. d) There is no relationship (or very little relationship) between the effectivness of a combattant or the courage of a person and the degree to which they might be subject to PTSD after the fact. Being traumatised by war does not make one weak or cowardly. Case in point: Audie Murphy was the most decorated US serviceman in WWII. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, the Légion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre with palm. That's about as distinguished a military career as anybody's ever had, ever. He also suffered, throughout his postwar life, with PTSD, and became a leading advocate for soldiers with psychological wounds. So courage or unfitness for battle has nothing to do with it.
• Thanks, Dreadnought, though I still sort of think the prison camp guards aren't the most helpful of an example.
• We have a military, and it provides several vital services to the nation, not the least of which is deterrent against potential military attack on us Perhaps unlike SOME of you, I respect chimaera's comments on this topic immensely - and fully concur with this statement. Fact is, the military DO provide a service that many of you are simply incapable of providing yourselves, given that you're all such middle-class liberal wieners. Case in point is the military I've decide to join - the Lord's Resistance Army. If these guys weren't all tooled up and ready for action, do you think the Lord would actually be able to resist ANYTHING? Of course not - he's terrible at resistance. Acceptance - sure, he’ll take anybody, the slut. But RESISTANCE? No dice, pacafacests. Of course, you gotta get in early if you want to join the LRA – why, many of their most battle-scarred veterans are only 8 years old. But I'm looking good, because I'm actually still a foetus. It'll be a real bitch getting squeezed out the ol’ womb-chute while holding an AK-47, but I just hope Mom will understand that it's for a greater good.
• Safety on, quid.
• I would rather armies not be needed for anything. Quid's too.
• the prison camp guards aren't the most helpful of an example. Ever hear of the Stanford prison experiment? I was in the Army and here is my experience. The Army is an inactive bureaucracy most of time. Because of it's inactivity, a great deal of time is spent in "preparation" for war. Training is not the best venue for personal achievement, so career army people find other means to advance their position in the system. Enter a HIGHLY political system of ass kissing and back stabbing. They have a term called "dropping a dime" (I don't know where that came from) getting people in trouble. I was in one unit where they called the Battalion coin a dime. Keep in mind there is absolutely no criteria for promotion, outside the commanders discretion. Unlike the Air Force the Army has no testing system for competence, mental stability, or intelligence. You end up with a great deal of "middle management" that tend to be of dubious, if not outright asshole character. These assholes have little regard for anyone unless it involves them securing their own promotion. So soldiers that are fucked in the head reflect poorly on your squad/company, its best to get them out as quick as possible. Then you have these great squad/company reviews and you get promoted. I never fit into the Army.
• > "dropping a dime" (I don't know where that came from) I always assumed it referred to making a call from a public phone box?
• makes sense
• /rimshot
• woah! woah! Easy on them hammers, Jake!
• I remember Dreadnought telling me that a large number of prison camp officers in the Holocaust ended up committing suicide. These were men who weren't even subjected to poor conditions, just inflicting them on others. But human psyches are not able to handle the way we like being bastards to each other. There's another possibility here, and that's the fact that the Germans lost the war, and their actions in the camps, rather than being praised as "heroic" by a victorious Nazi Germany and the public around them, were reviled, both within the nation and abroad. The fact that many of them also were subject to prosecution under crimes against humanity probably also contributed to the high suicide rate.
• The reason I brought up the prison guards was to show that a) even when people aren't in danger they are traumatised, and b) that's the example I could think of. But to answer chimera - the prison guards were suffering psychological stress before the end of the war. It wasn't about how society saw them, it what they were required to do. Also (to the thread in general), I wouldn't be too sure that the prison guards are so different. We kind it so easy to vilify people, but we don't know how we would have acted in their place. We may think we do, but we don't.
• I'd have to disagree, jb. I think the Holocaust was unusually evil and that the people who organised and ran the camps deserve our condemnation. But let's, uh, re-rail?
• I want to think that our military are given the best services possible. I know they are hurting. But I don't get squat from anyone; I ask vet services and get non-responses. I ask the righties and it's now the Democrat problem. Ask the demos and it's not their legacy. Did anyone else not predict, let alone suspect, this logjam? We dug a hell of a hole; we are climbing on better shoulders than ours to get out of it.
• This happens with every war. Remember the Bonus Army. This is pretty much par for the course in our country. I agree with jb completely about taking the Nazi's out of the equation by describing them as different than the rest of humanity. I have never read Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt but I have read so many books referencing it I have a general idea of it's impact (come to think of it I guess I need to read it). Arendt suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from common people. Some current philosophers (hate to bring up Zizek againg, but I am gonna) have argued that the topic of what really happened in Germany with the Nazi's needs to be addressed on a human level. Zizek argues that in regards to this thinking their is a "Denkverbot," or thinking is forbidden on the subject. To address the issues of what happened in Nazi Germany is to address something that is very present in all of us, and Western society does not want to face that. So Nazi's are the evil and that is that, end of discussion, which is not a manner in which academia or anyone should perceive human history.
• I have a bad habit of typing their as there and vice versa.
• "I think the Holocaust was unusually evil" No, it wasn't. That's the shocking thing that most people can't face. The genocide against the German Jews was by no means unusual. It hadn't happened on that scale, nor in the 20th Century, an era of mass communication and records. But in terms of human history, it was much the same as usual. Similar pogroms have occurred against various groups for thousands of years. There are too many examples to list, but two that spring to mind are the Albigensian Crusade and the massacre of the Huguenots. People might say, oh, these are not the same, but aside from the scale & organisational efficiency of the Nazi genocide, in terms of human warfare, it's exactly the same. People shrink from acknowledging the barbarity & atavism that lurks below the surface in human nature. And it can happen again, witness the war in Bosnia - Herzegovina. Don't delude yourself that the Nazi atrocities against the Jews was 'unusually evil'. That's a nice way of separating oneself from it, saying "it can't happen here." It can, & it will. And in armed conflict, for example in Iraq, we see these psychologically warped young soldiers engaging in just the same kind of atrocities, which are by no means rare. The killing of civilians, rape, pillage, all kinds of torture & atrocity are the usual thing in war. This is what war does to a human being. My grandfather served in the Pacific alongside Americans, & came home having seen the trophy hunting of Japanese skulls & all sorts of wanton horrors that most people don't talk about. But that doesn't mean they don't happen. People are afraid of the truth.
• Who here said the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from common people? Who introduced the word 'psychopath' into the thread, and who warned against it? Who here said that the Holocaust was uniquely evil, or the only example of mass murder in human history? In fact, who said anything much about the Holocaust except those of you who, for reasons which, you know, escape me, have decided this thread is the place to say a word on behalf of those 'vilified' regular guys, the Nazi concentration camp guards?
• darling - There was a story recently in the news about a woman who applied for a job. She was told it was working with dogs. She later found out that she would be a guard with a dog in a concetration camp; had she refused the job, she would have been jailed or killed herself. Was she "evil"? Any society is capable of great evil, and the majority of people in any society are capable of going along with that evil than they would believe. There are a few people who would stand up against it - but precious few. And none of us know if we are one of those few until we are actually put to the test. If we pretend "it could never happen here", then we are condemning ourselves into not recognising when something evil does start to happen. How many French condenmed the massacre of thousands of people for their religion? (Not many - they were just heretics/protestants, after all). How many British spoke out when their colonies introduced laws creating a permanent slave race in the 17th and 18th centuries? How many Canadians justified the War Measures act in the 1970s, and the arrest of people without charge? How many Americans today are speaking out against the abolishing of habeus corpus, a legal right the Anglo world has held since 1215? At what point do people speak out? In most cases, not until things are really bad. And then it can be too late, and they can no longer speak. ---------Back on topic---------------- I was the person who introduced the word "psychopath" (albeit in the vague lay sense, not the precise psychological meaning which I don't fully understand), but you were the one who said that there was no comparison to American soldiers (and thus implied that "Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from common people"). It turns out that I misremembered Dreadnought's example. The prison guards and commandants did write home complaining of psychological distress (the symptoms are clear in the letters, even when they don't explicitly say so), but the high suicide rate he had cited to me was specifically among those who participated in death squads, rounding up groups of people and shooting them. (Because that was what the specific study was on). I brought up the example to show that even people so fully socialised into dehumanising the other can be psychologically damaged by being asked to commit violence. It was an extreme example, but my point was that even these men, whom society would like to dismiss as "evil" and "nothing like us", were affected by what they did. This is pertinent to the discussion - it means that if we wanted to find soldiers who would not suffer PTSD or adverse mental health effects from war, we would have to look for people who were less affected by other people's suffering than death squad volunteers. And I think it would be a very bad idea to give those kind of people - sociopaths or people with no feeling for others, whatever the technical term is - I think it would be a bad idea to give a gun to someone I was sure would not be mentally affected. So the fact that American soldiers are adversely mentally affected by war saddens me greatly, but makes me respect those men more.
• I think the current DSM IV definition of a person with no empathy or feelings for others is Antisocial Personality Disorder; both sociopaths & psychopaths are listed as subsets & as more severe forms within this general range, although it appears that in DSM V psychopathy will be listed as a separate disorder.
• Scientists explore the frightening world of psychopaths
• Local Marine now accused killer: Memories of Iraq bloodshed haunted vet charged in girlfriend's death, comrades say
• One in 11 prisoners in the UK are former members of the armed services [Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn] Llwyd said thousands of former members of the armed services who served either in the Gulf or Afghanistan had been subsequently convicted of offences and jailed. He claimed that "effectively when armed personnel return, there is no help for them," and said the position in the UK "contrasts greatly with the way the United States provide counselling and assistance to their armed personnel".