What Made Him Snap? Soldier Goes on Killing Spree in Baghdad 'Stress Clinic'

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted May 11, 2009.

Today's soldiers may be less likely to focus rage and frustration on their officers, but may well simply lose focus altogether, causing indiscriminate damage to themselves or whoever is within reach.

Tim Albone, a British journalist, recently spent time at Camp Liberty's Stress Control Center. His report, reprinted on the Army's Web site, describes the kind of emotional support soldiers seeking psychiatric counseling are offered.

"This is mental health military-style," writes Albone. Soldiers are referred to as warriors, not patients; PTSD is referred to as post-traumatic growth; and trauma is talked about as something to be learned from -- something that will "help you grow." He quotes Maj. Kevin Gormley, the center commander, saying, "Our job is to keep soldiers on the battlefield, not send them home." Maj. Thomas Jarrett, who runs the "warrior resiliency and thriving" program, echoes: "Our goal is to get back to the fight and get on with business ... we deploy, we fight our nation's wars."

Such combat stress units have been in place for more than a decade, during which time the suicide rate among soldiers has continued to rise, and the Army has continued to deny that a connection exists.

Also from Flashback:

The Army's response to the fragging epidemic during the Vietnam years was revealing of an institution that had lost the ability to critique and evaluate its own internal culture: they took the soldiers' guns away and restricted their access to explosives. By 1970, in many units, only those soldiers on guard duty or patrol were allowed to carry their weapons.

An enlisted man quoted in the New York Times claimed that "the American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key." The Saturday Review called it "symbolic of the Army's plight" that "the men are not even trusted to carry the weapons necessary to fight the war they have been sent to wage."

Military police units were also expanded and used to quell any actual or threatened insurrection. American guns turned on unarmed American boys was no less of a tragic irony in Vietnam than at Kent State in Ohio or Jackson State in Mississippi.

And it is no less of an irony that the total of six students killed and 21 wounded at Kent State and Jackson State made more of an impression on the country and did more to bring the war to an end than the tens of thousands who had already died in Vietnam.

GI resistance to the war in Vietnam was widespread and is largely forgotten. I suspect that those of us in the anti-war movement owe the profoundest of apologies to those whose resistance to the war, in whatever form it took -- refusing orders, sabotage, drug use, desertion, even fragging -- was based in a rejection of government policy and a more personal, but equally profound rejection of war.

The despair that motivated their rebellion has much to teach us about what kinds and degrees of moral or rational behavior can be asked or expected of men (or women) in combat and under what conditions.

Our experiences during the Vietnam War years offered an opportunity for communication across the boundaries of class, education, race and experience in the search for better solutions than war. PTSD -- and PTSD-related violence and suicide -- has to be seen as one among many forms of moral and psychological response to a betrayal of what's right.

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Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.

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