Most of us probably think of killing as pointless. We don't like predator drones, wanted dead or alive posters, capital punishment, dropping white phosphorus or incendiaries or nukes on cities, and we aren't big fans of the militaries idea that the more people you kill the more likely you are to win. Win what?
I think there is some terrible irony that a military trained psychologist specializing in listening to personal accounts of PTSD on a base that has had 50 suicides in the last year and posting to blogs trying to understand the logic of suicide bombers is our latest serial killer.
There seems to be some threshold of denial that our minds cross when things get so bad that we just can't suck it up any more, can't deal with the problem any more, some level of cognitive dissonance that triggers the flee or fight response that requires us to at a minimum start screaming "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" or a step or two beyond that either kill ourselves or kill everybody else in the room or both.
I'm not qualified to analyze why the doctor lost it here, why he was so stressed out about going to Iraq, or possibly a whole slew of personal problems we haven't even heard of yet, but I would allow there may be reasons why we should stop screaming terrorist every time somebody with a foreign sounding name encounters their own personal demons in this way.
I'm pretty sure that before somebody straps on an explosive device and decides to take a few people with them when they escape from the tortures of their own mind, something has happened to that individual that rarely gets taken into account.
I think the same thing applies to soldier suicides and the people who lose their jobs or their homes or their wives and kids and go shoot up the local hamburger joint.
I'd even allow that it happens to nations that suffer a lot of casualties in war, go through a holocaust, or become terrified of change that is so rapid they simply can't adapt to it.
I think I can observe the danger signs of that disorder in what went down with the kidnapping, torture, and murder of the Bush administration, the CIA decision to take the gloves off and let General Dostum suffocate a couple of thousand Taliban prisoners after Mike Spann was torn apart by the prisoners taken with Johnathan Walker Lindh; the thousands of small mistakes that happen in war and taken in the aggregate get people to where they just can't live with themselves any more.
We can see it with the teabaggers getting worked up enough to bring their guns to town hall meetings over the realization that this is no longer a white christian nation and they are no longer in control.
Maybe we as a nation have PTSD.