“Character matters,” says Dr. Jeffrey Moore, a neuropsychologist to the New York Times. “The personality strengths that the person brings to the captivity experience helps them bounce back, and specifically whether prior to captivity they’re an optimist or a pessimist.”
Can the optimist that survived 5 years of Taliban imprisonment and managed 2 separate escapes turn into a pessimist after being swift-boated in his own country? What the Taliban may not have been able to break, perhaps Rush and Sean and Company can.
I am not an optimist and I for this reason (among others) cannot claim to have a fighting chance of surviving 5 years at Taliban gun point. Nor could I for that matter have been necessarily brave enough to -- as Bowe did -- volunteer to fight in a combat zone. Once captured I am pretty sure my pessimism would have prevented me from escaping more than once.
But its not the enemy who will deliver the debilitating blow. Its the shriekers and the haters and the people who question everyone else's fitness to serve or character on the battlefield when they have never served themselves.
Bowe has a long "reintegration" process ahead of him according to today's Times and part of that process is no t.v. or radio or even contact with family or friends. That's not hard to understand. If Bowe turned on the t.v. or the radio (doesn't matter the channel -right wing or "middle of the road" broadcasters are the same on this issue although CNN is particularly skeevy) he would see and hear what was probably unthinkable during those long years in a metal cage.
One could imagine that Bowe's optimism may have been enough to get him through while he was in the hands of the enemy. But what happens when he finds out that the real enemy of his mental health is wrapping itself in the red, white and blue and driving a Suburban. Then what happens? How does reality alter at that moment? Its like finding out your father worked for the KGB when you thought he worked at Xerox. It doesn't compute. The very nature of the shifting sands, finding the completely unexpected buried in the heart of the familiar, that will be the cruelest blow of all.
And on and on they go. The haters. The swiftboaters. There is a word for how they are treating Bowe -- Traitorous (there I said it) . They are traitorous for they have disrupted our one unifying principle as Americans. Pro-war, anti-war. Never mattered which side you were on. We ALL agreed on this ONE thing. A final sliver of our collective innocence. Bring them home. Now that is gone too. And for what? A few bucks? Sell a few papers?
Traitorous