"It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it."
So Robert E. Lee spoke looking at the slaughter of the Union troops as they failed in their assault on Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg. But in our current wars we do not fully look at the slaughter. For too long we hide the returning corpses. Too few of us see the broken bodies.
And then there are the broken souls, the shattered psyches.
The psychic toll of this foolish and apparently endless war has been profound since day one. And the nation’s willful denial of that toll has been just as profound.
So writes Bob Herbert in a New York Times column offered in response to the shooting deaths at a mental health center for US military in Baghdad. In War's Psychic Toll he reminds us of how few are bearing these burdens. I want to extract a few more quotes and offer a few thoughts of my own. I invite you to continue reading.
Herbert writes
This is what happens in wars. Wars are about killing, and once the killing is unleashed it takes many, many forms. Which is why it’s so sick to fight unnecessary wars, and so immoral to send other people’s children off to wars — psychic as well as physical — from which one’s own children are carefully protected.
It is not clear to me what are truly necessary wars. Oh, I am aware of the need to defend one's nation when it is attacked, or about to be attacked. But even then I wonder how and why things rise to the level where even that violence of defense becomes necessary. IF we glorify one war - perhaps as "The Good War" - do we not risk glorifying all war? Do we not create a psychology that each generation has a similar challenge? Do we not shape our thinking by ideas such as "what did you do in the war, Daddy?" as the lens through which we interpret behavior?
Gandhi once said
"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
As an individual speaking only for oneself that sentiment is noble and perhaps admirable. Although I am a Quaker by choice, a "Convinced Friend" as we say, I cannot fully ascribe to Gandhi's sentiment, for even as a teacher I am fully prepared to kill to protect the children in my care should I ever be confronted with that horrible possibility. And thus I am also willing to grant some leniency in how I judge those in positions of leadership who must confront the possibility of ordering young - and nowadays not so young - men and women into situations in which they face harm and death, both to them and caused by them, the latter possibly just as horrifying if one retains one's humanity.
From Herbert again:
Because we have chosen not to share the sacrifices of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrible burden of these conflicts is being shouldered by an obscenely small portion of the population. Since this warrior class is so small, the same troops have to be sent into the war zones for tour after harrowing tour.
As the tours mount up, so do the mental health problems. Combat is crazy-making to start with. Multiple tours are recipes for complete meltdowns.
the terrible burden of these conflicts is being shouldered by an obscenely small portion of the population
I served during Vietnam, albeit relatively briefly and only stateside. There was a draft, although as a Marine I had enlisted. The war's horror had not yet reached its apex - perhaps seen beginning with the Tet Offensive of January, 1968 - by the time I was discharged. Yet even at relatively sedate Quantico we saw the psychic damage of some returning from even one tour. They returned to a nation, even to a Marine Corps, not fully mobilized. They found themselves in environments where the stresses of a new kind of conflict were not fully grasped, where perhaps they could not talk about their experiences except with others who had been there. In some sense those who return from conflict always face that difficulty: lest you had been there, how could you hope to understand? And if you had experienced horror, perhaps even done some horrific things, how could share that burden except with others who had that in common with you?
I have seen men of my father's generation who lived through things like the Battle of the Bulge who would not talk with their families about what they had seen, what they had experienced, what they themselves had done. Until they encountered someone else who had been there, and then the barriers would drop and they would fall on one another. I last saw this at the first showing of "Saving Private Ryan" in DC where I was the only one in that early afternoon not of that generation. The slaughter of the early moments, both of the Americans in the surf and by the Americans after they had scaled the heights of Omaha Beach, were simply too much for one man who had to leave and was sitting in the lobbying shaking as he silently wepted, his elderly wife trying to comfort him. He had been there, at Omaha.
Herbert points us at a Rand study that says one in five, perhaps 300,000 total, of those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffer from P.T.S.D or depression. He cites a CBS study which finds returning veterans ages 20-24 are 2-4 times as likely to become suicides as are their non-veteran age contemporaries.
Such suffering and depression is an unfortunate but concomitant side effect of combat. The less committed the nation is to that conflict, the harder it is for the returning combat veteran to justify to himself the horror of which Lee spoke. Those of us who lived through the era of Vietnam must recognize that as the opposition to the war justifiably increased, so did the difficulties for those returning. We tried to learn from the mistakes of Vietnam, both as a nation and in the military. Perhaps we did not learn all the right lessons, on either part. Then it was one tour and out of country, unless one volunteered to return. It was a year for the Army, 13 months for the Marines. But there were no counseling centers for those suffering stress, nothing like the site of last week's horrible shooting. Too many of our veterans wound up with broken lives. We might acknowledge the cost when the honor guard with the flag at a national political convention was filled by homeless veterans from Vietnam. Jan Scruggs wrote of the effort to build the Wall, the Vietnam Memorial, as an effort to heal a nation. And that wall has remarkable healing power. I choose to take visitors at night, when the lack of sunlight makes the starkness of all the names that much more poignant and powerful. I know people on that wall. I have seen people who did not serve find the names of people they knew, lovingly touch the letters, perhaps take a paper image of those letters. And I have seen the myriad items left behind, both there and at the rotating displays at the Musem of American History not far away. The only equivalent in my experience was to see the complete Aids Quilt on the Ellipse, shortly before it became too large to have all of the quilts displayed together. Yet even now, in 2009, the number of quilts is less than the number of names on that wall. Still, the impact is powerful.
The conclusion of the Herbert piece should bring the reader up short:
But the country soothes its conscience and tamps down its guilt with the cowardly invocation: "Oh, they’re volunteers. They knew what they were getting into."
Perhaps they were volunteers in military service. Most, however, were not volunteers for this war. We should all remember how many have had their service involuntarily extended, or found their status in Individual Ready Reserve meant their being abruptly removed from their civilian life and forced back into uniform and to a combat situation.
But even if volunteer, that does not give us the right as a nation to force them, their families, and their loved ones to bear all the burden. That makes the horror they experience so much more painful, so much more difficult to bear.
If it is of such a national imperative that we go to conflict, then the entire nation has a responsibility to help bear the ensuing burdens. Even those of us who have opposed the particular military endeavor with every fiber of our being still have a responsibility as citizens of a liberal democracy to support and care for those who do serve, whether their service is forced upon them or even completely of their own volition. Volunteer or conscript, they are in harm's way on behalf of all of us, for it is the leadership of a nation for which we are the ultimate sovereign, and hence also the ones ultimately responsible.
We have already seen the reluctance of too many to bear even part of the burdens. We denied public recognition of the returning dead. Some objected for political reasons when Ted Koppel first read the names of the dead on television. More recently, some of us were horrified to see political leaders opposed to the benefits of Webb's GI Bill on the grounds that it might cause some to be more willing to leave the service - those opponents worried that their might not be enough warm bodies - yes, bodies - to fill the ranks for a continuation of the horrible policy of taking some to die and to kill so others can have cheap gasoline, and political leaders can aggrandize unchecked power to the executive.
To die and to kill. We too often forget the latter. I remember reading an interview with Paul Rieckhoff, I believe with Bob Herbert, where he talked about this being perhaps the hardest order to give, because the taking of another human life inevitably permanently changes the one does the killing. We don't often talk about that.
In part that is why I quoted Gandhi. Sometimes we may not have a choice but to kill. We are going to be permanently affected by doing so. There used to be rules in the early church that those who had spilled blood could not be ordained priests, because as priests they would be performing a bloodless sacrifice. Thomas Merton wrote of seeing veterans returning after WWII with broken souls appearing at the gates of the Kentucky Monastery in which he lived, perhaps appropriately named Gesthemane, after the Garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in which the night before his crucifixion Jesus prayed.
War is horrible. It is sometimes unavoidable. I remember reading the words of a decorated general that when we have to go to war in some ways our military has already failed. I remember the words of an Orthodox monk who during WWII prayed that the less evil side might prevail. War may inspire noble acts of sacrifice and courage, but is unavoidably evil.
If we do not bear that burden together as a society, then we condemn those who do serve, and their families, to carrying the burden and the horror of that evil unfairly.
That psychic toll is too much to ask of others. It is cruel. It is destructive. It is our shame as a nation that we might even consider the cowardly rationalization with which Herbert ends" "Oh, they’re volunteers. They knew what they were getting into."
So did we. It is our nation. It is, for better or worse, whether we supported, acquiesced or opposed, also our war. And thus it is our shame.
I want for all what I want for myself.
Peace.