Trained to Harm: How the Military Abuses Its Own

Accidents," Alexander Cockburn once wrote, "are normalcy raised to the level of drama." The same may be said for scandal, the shocking event that turns out not to have been so shocking after all once the tape is rewound, the warning signs exquisitely detailed and the "big picture" filled in. The scandal du jour is the rampage of Cho Seung-Hui, a "quiet" boy, "no trouble at all" until he killed 32 people at Virginia Tech and others began to recall that, why yes, there were those creepy actions and creepier plays, those diagnoses of mental illness, the telltale trail of every scared, sick loner who one day snaps, adding his victims to the 30,000 Americans killed with guns in far more ordinary circumstances each year.

"Thanks to you I die like Jesus Christ to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people," Cho said in his video. It is as if he had been reading from the scripts of school-shooters past, every one of whom had been taunted as a wuss, or rejected by a girl, or was lonely and withdrawn, or had written harrowing stories of mayhem and slaying. Like them, Cho was finally notable for his orgy of slaughter and the demented aspect of his immortality fantasy; otherwise, he merely supplied the latest dramatic uptick in the long-running saga of the marriage of weakness and cruelty.

Today, Cho; yesterday, Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The injured soldiers at the center of that earlier scandal certainly qualify as weak and defenseless people, except that the object of fascination while they dominated the 24/7 churn of cable news was not their career as killers or the preparations that readied them to kill. They were the victims in the scandal. About the perpetrator, Walter Reed, the question "How could this have happened?" was not answered with any of the searching examination the press brings to the biography of mass murderers. Naturally, we aren't meant to think of soldiers as trained killers or of any military installation as part of an institution of mass murder. It might help if we did. Certainly it would help aspiring recruits better understand what they are getting into, and help wounded veterans understand why they would be degraded as soon as they'd outlived their usefulness to the trade.

The truth is, a system dedicated to transforming psychologically healthy people into people capable of performing what in any other setting is considered a pathological act can't help behaving badly -- not all the time or in all of its realms, not monolithically so that everyone associated with it is scathed. But inevitably the ends deform the means, and inevitably someone pays. No one is talking about it, but what happened at Walter Reed to soldiers injured in war is not shocking at all if one ponders what happens at Army posts to soldiers injured in basic training.

"Like being incarcerated"

Basic training is one of those regimens of cruelty that people have come to accept as normal. The Army has officially eliminated some of its most abusive practices, along with its theory of "breaking them down to build them up," the classic humiliation of recruits by a drill sergeant, designed to make them into soldiers capable of acting as a unit, following orders and killing. This reshaping remains essential; it is simply meant to be accomplished with more respect now. In all events, weakness is to be despised, which means that the 15 to 37 percent of men and the 38 to 67 percent of women who sustain at least one injury due to the rigors of basic training at Fort Sill, Fort Knox, Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood or Fort Benning are in trouble.

A year ago I visited Fort Sill, Okla., where the son of a friend had suffered stress fractures during basic training and was then in the post's physical training and rehabilitation program. PTRP is where the Army, desperate for bodies in a time of war, puts broken enlistees whom it is committed neither to curing nor to releasing, nor even to respecting as soldiers and human beings. Basic training takes nine weeks; PTRP can warehouse soldiers for months, in anticipation of the time they manage to recuperate, pass the grueling PT (physical training) test and go on to battle-readiness; or fail the test, try again, stumble through the bureaucratic labyrinth until the point at which they are chaptered out or medically discharged. As trainees, all have yet to be granted "permanent party" status in the Army. In the military hierarchy, this makes them lower life forms, which is how they were being treated at Fort Sill.