The psychological toll Iraq has on soldiers.
With unusual candor, Air Force One, a soldier, blogged about his experiences both in Iraq and in civilian life afterwards. It shows the psychological difficulty that many US soldiers have in fighting the war in Iraq and coping with the return to civilization afterwards. This person is hardly alone in his struggles; many soldiers have similar problems coping when returning from war and adjusting to civilian life. The trauma of war that many people go through is so great that they have difficulty forming normal relationships. And many veterans have toruble getting jobs after they are done with the military because employers are not sure they have the skills compatable with their company.
As an Airman I’m not supposed to feel weakness or anything of that sort. When I was over in Iraq, I was hoping for 2 things, to make Iraq like the U.S. and to get killed. I failed in both miserably. When I got back I saw a nation where I wasn’t proud to call myself an American.
I first met her at my new job, being an Airman in all, at properly introduced myself, and then I realized that is very quiet and very shy. My only problem was that I wanted to go back into the Air Force later and not have anyone to worry about me, and the other reason was that she was 4 years younger than me. We got along for a while until I wanted to ask her something and she wouldn’t listen, so I left and she sent some kid outside to give me hell, and he said “the girl in the red jacket said that military people are a bunch of losers and pussies.”
The point is that we as a society glorify the military in general and treat our young men who have not seen the horrors of war like heroes. But when they come back from war, the tone is completely different. Now, many people have had experiences that are totally different than this individual. But psychological trauma happens to almost every single soldier exposed to combat. Killology is a research group dedicated to studying the psychological effects of war on soldiers. They find some amazing stats:
But even with the careful application of the principles of proximity and expectancy the incidence of psychiatric casualties is still enormous. During World War II, 504,000 men were lost from America's combat forces due to psychiatric collapse--enough to man 50 divisions. The United States suffered this loss despite efforts to weed out those mentally and emotionally unfit for combat by classifying more than 800,000 men 4-F (unfit for military service) due to psychiatric reasons. At one point in World War II, psychiatric casualties were being discharged from the U.S. Army faster than new recruits were being drafted in.
Swank and Marchand's World War II study of US Army combatants on the beaches of Normandy found that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98% of the surviving soldiers had become psychiatric casualties. And the remaining 2% were identified as "aggressive psychopathic personalities." Thus it is not too far from the mark to observe that there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98% of all men insane, and the other 2% were crazy when they got there. Figure 1 presents a schematic representation of the effects of continuous combat.
First of all, the fact that at one point in WW2 we were discharging troops for mental health reasons quicker than we were letting them in speaks volumes. We have much lower enlistment levels for Iraq than we did for WW2. If form holds true, at some point in time, we will discharge more psychiatric casualties than we can sign up recruits. At that point, we will be unable to sustain our troop levels and be forced to admit the failure of the War in Iraq.
The second point is that our troops see many more days of continuous combat than they did during World War II. This means that the psychological effect on our troops will be much worse than World War II. It takes someone with the internal fortitude of a John Kerry to be able to survive such a war and come out with your mental health reasonably intact.
For 2006 and 2008, we need to elect politicians who will value human lives over the profits of Halliburton and big oil companies. I could care less at this point if they are Democratic or Republican. What matters more is their ability to relate to people like Air Force One as people and not toy soldiers they can send to the next videogame-style war.
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