Troop Massacre in Baghdad Puts War Trauma Under the Spotlight

SAN FRANCISCO, May 11 (IPS) -- A U.S. soldier shot five of his colleagues dead at a base in Baghdad, Iraq Monday. The Pentagon says at least two other people were hurt in the shootings and the gunman is in custody.

Details are still coming in, but the incident reportedly happened at a stress clinic where troops get help for personal issues or combat trauma.

At an afternoon press conference, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was tight-lipped about the details of the shooting, the first such spree by a U.S. soldier through six years of war in Iraq.

"We're still in the process of gathering information on exactly what happened," Gates said, "but if the preliminary reports are confirmed, such a tragic loss of life at the hands of our own forces is a cause for great and urgent concern."

A military statement said the shooting took place at around 2 p.m. local time in the mental health clinic at Camp Liberty, a sprawling base next to Baghdad International Airport. The Pentagon said the names of the dead soldiers were being withheld pending family notification. The name of the shooter was also not released.

Veterans' advocates say the details of the incident will be critical in assessing whether the killings could have been prevented.

"We need to know if this soldier was examined by a physician before or after deployment and if any mental health symptoms were observed," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

"We know from repeated Congressional investigations and hearings that the military has knowingly sent soldiers with physical and mental health diagnoses and severe symptoms back to the war zones. In some cases, the service members killed themselves or others," he said.

More than 230 active soldiers, airmen and marines committed suicide last year -- the highest military suicide statistic in nearly 30 years. In January, more U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

In November 2006, a New York National Guardsman was arraigned in a military court on charges of murdering two officers in an explosion at one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

The series of incidents leaves some observers to recall the military's internal meltdown during the Vietnam War.

"In December of 1972, the Defense Department acknowleged that somewhere between 800 and 1,000 officers had actually been blown up by their subordinates," explained Vietnam war widow Penny Coleman, author of the book Flashback: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Suicide and the Lessons of War.

Back then, the killings were called 'fragging' because fragmentation bombs were usually used.

"The fragmentation devices were the weapon of choice because they left no evidence. There were obviously no fingerprints," Coleman said. "There was no way of tracking it."

Iraq war veterans watched the news come in with a mixture of shock, outrage, and resignation.

Former U.S. Army Captain Luis Carlos Montalvan received two Purple Hearts for wounds sustained during his two tours in Iraq. He first saw the news in the waiting room in Manhattan's Veterans' Affairs hospital, where Montalvan and his fellow veterans had all been waiting for hours to see a doctor.

"We were just shaking our heads," he said.

Montalvan said many of his fellow veterans felt a mix of irony and horror that while they were waiting for hours to receive government health care stateside, their active duty counterparts were being killed by one of their own in a clinic in the war zone.

"It's horrifying," he added, "that there were men and women in a combat stress center at Camp Liberty who were going to seek help and now their relatives back home who thought that their loved ones were going to get treatment are dead. They went to get treatment and they're dead. Can you imagine the grief?"