War and Pieces of the Mind

Posted on January 9, 2007 in Occupation of Iraq PTSD

One kind of surge can lead to another.

No diagnosis is presented for Pfc. Steven D. Green other than “homicidal ideation”. What we know is that he was seen by a field psychiatrist and put on a light regimen of [[Seroquel]]. Then they sent him back into the field.

Within a few weeks, an Iraqi family appears to have paid for Green’s release:

On March 12, 2006, Iraqi police reported a break-in at the home of a family in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles from Baghdad. The intruders shot and killed the father, mother and two young daughters. The older girl, 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, was raped and her body set afire.

The carnage first was assumed to be the work of insurgents. That changed in late June when two members of Green’s unit told their superiors of suspicions that soldiers were involved in the killings. Now the Army believes Green and four other soldiers are responsible. One of them has confessed and provided information to prosecutors; in testimony at his court-martial, the soldier identified Green as the ringleader.

If the charges are true, the attack would be among the most horrific instances of criminal behavior by American troops in the nearly four-year-old war. It also would represent a worst-case scenario for the military’s much-criticized practice of keeping mentally and emotionally unfit personnel in the killing fields of Iraq.

You cannot take a damaged human being out of a stressful situation, give that human being a handful of pills, and put that human being back in the hornet’s nest expecting that human being to “be just fine”. And there is no ongoing situation — for the combatant or the person who is just there — worse than war.

I can attest to this because in 1992, I was in an active war zone where soldiers prowled the streets with AK-47s and the night was sometimes convulsed by explosions. It wasn’t as bad as Iraq — I am speaking of Croatia — but it was bad enough. My head felt like it was clamped between two bags of hardened concrete. I was scared, looking around for danger and looking around for danger even on the most peaceable streets. There’s a dissonance to be lived when you know that bombs could drop at any moment and yet you have to behave like everyone else, as if it were just another sunny day in July.

One night, when I visited the city of Osijek, there was a loud blast that shook all the windows. What had happened? Oh, said the building’s janitor, they’ve just razed a Serb’s house so he can’t come back. (That also happened in the neighborhood where I lived in Zagreb. The boom shook all the windows.) That night, he took me downstairs to his office in the basement of the University of Osijek to show me the amazing collection of weapons he’d amassed to defend himself. There was an [[AK-47]], some kind of automatic pistol and a couple of hand grenades. He pulled out a beige slab of [[plastique]], lit a cigarette, and laughed when I dashed out of the room as he extinguished the cigarette on the block.

Then there were the maimed people you’d meet — soldiers who had lost their heads and people whose limbs had been twisted, scarred, and rearranged by explosions and the desperate cures of frontline physicians. I confess that a veil of numbness descended over me. I walked around inside that veil for weeks on end and when I returned home, the war did not leave me. It was the single event which forced me to realize that I was mentally ill.

From time to time, someone would translate a newspaper story of some soldier come home from the front. He would call his family into the living room and drop a grenade. Penance, it was thought, for what he had done to someone else’s family.

I was a nonviolent observer. No one gave me a grenade and I would not have carried one anyways. But Private Green was shoved back out into the war right after an ambush, fully provisioned and armed:

he and five others were manning a checkpoint when an Iraqi civilian approached, according to testimony in military hearings. The civilian was familiar because of his status as a sometimes informant. He greeted the soldiers warmly before pulling a pistol from his belt and shooting two of them at point-blank range.

His behavior became more homicidal and anti-social. Yet it took more than five months to get him shipped out once he’d been declared “unfit for service”. Desperate for bodies to fill the uniforms in Mr. Bush’s dirty little war, the Army took its time sending him home. And the al-Janabis paid with their lives.

Mark this as another case bred out of a bad policy; the scion of a war that should not have been prosecuted in the first place. An antisocial character evolved out of a sociopathic conflict and the price was at least one family. No one gave me weapons when I was in Croatia. If they had, I probably would have thrown them to one side, cringed in the rubble, and cried. But each man and woman who goes to war, who experiences the daily infection of destruction and confusion, reacts in his or her own way. I don’t know what to think about Green, even knowing that he was mentally ill. I do know what I think of the regime that sent him there. It seems to be run by a sociopath who has lunatics carrying out his will. Putting a battle-maddened, shattered man back into the killing fields? We have not learned yet another lesson from Vietnam, that pieces of the mind can become shrapnel.