For some vets, the war will never end

Accompanied by the first lady, President Obama flew to Fort Hood, Texas, last week to console a mourning military community and eulogize three soldiers, all veterans of the Iraq war, who had been killed there a week earlier by Ivan Lopez, a fellow Iraq vet who had been under treatment for depression.
It was Obama’s second visit to the sprawling army post. His first was in November 2009, which he made to console relatives of the victims of a similar, more deadly rampage, that one by Maj. Nidal Hasan, an American-born Muslim whose parents had emigrated to the US from the West Bank and who, embittered by the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had opened fire at a medical center on the post, killing 13 people. (The then 39-year-old psychiatrist and Medical Corps officer was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. He awaits the results of appeals by his defense team.)
Addressing an estimated 3,000 people, a grim-faced Obama said: “Part of what makes this so painful is that we’ve been there before. This tragedy tears at wounds still raw from five years ago. Once more, soldiers who survived foreign war zones were struck down here at home, where they’re supposed to be safe. We still do not yet know exactly why.”
The why of it may not be readily clear, but what is clear is that in wars such as those waged by a big power — in far away places, against little peoples with cultures American soldiers do not grasp, in pursuit of a cause no one seems to comprehend — violence is rampant, incessant and traumatizing, visited on the soul of the invader as on that of the invaded. In a way, the war comes home with the soldiers.
For some returning vets, the war they had fought will never end. Its demons will afflict them for years, maybe for the rest of their lives, wreaking havoc on their internal psychic economy and on their ability to reintegrate in civilian life. And occasionally it will drive them into acts of wanton, inexplicable violence, against a spouse, a friend, a stranger.
In World War I, this affliction was called “shell shock.” In World War II, the deadliest war in history, with 60 million deaths, it was called “battle fatigue.” In the 1970s, following the war in Vietnam, it officially became known in the therapeutic community as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). By any name, the disease defined the same mental health problem and displayed the same symptoms. And these symptoms are not ones that should be taken lightly: Acute anxiety, a predisposition to substance abuse, recurring nightmares, hyper-vigilance, flashbacks to war experiences, similar to hallucinations, numbness to one’s surroundings, known as “the thousand-yard stare,” survival guilt, startled responses to seemingly innocent questions and, yes, homicidal thoughts.
Not all returning vets, of course, suffer from PTSD, but enough do as to make it a national preoccupation for therapists. Consider this: One in five vets of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are diagnosed with the disease and vets account for 20 percent of US suicides. Treatment for vets seeking relief from the US Department of Veterans Affairs costs $8,300 annually per vet.
The situation takes a more dreadful turn when PTSD symptoms flare up not “post” but “ante” demobilization. Take, as a case in point, what is known in military vernacular as “flipping out,” where a soldier will lose his senses and commit a seemingly unpredictable act of violence while still stationed in a combat zone. On June 5, 2013, for example, an American soldier, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, was responsible for the deadliest and most gratuitous war crime committed by a single officer in the post-9/11 wars — he massacred, apparently on a whim, 16 Afghan civilians, women and children included. Asked why he had done it, he said blankly that he had “no good reason.”
And that is the kind of ritual terror that at times insinuates itself into the psyche of men sent to kill other men, men sent to fight wars they do not believe in, in a country they cannot locate, to kill a putative enemy whose name they cannot pronounce. And these men — and more increasingly in recent years, women — in the end rend their flesh, as it were, their being splintered into countless raw wounds.
And the men who send these men to fight unnecessary wars? They are the ones that history should berate, people like that Cold Warrior, counter-revolutionary, self-aggrandizing racist, Winston Churchill, who in a letter to a friend in 1916 wrote, as he gloated over the outbreak of World War I: “I think a curse should rest on me because I love this war. I know it is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.”
And here lies the tragedy, for the recent history of the mighty and the big, the rich and the privileged, has been defined by warmongers whose wars the young and the befuddled, the nameless and the faceless, are expected to fight. And they return with their humanity reduced to a fragment.