From the report:
“The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
“Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.
“About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.”
Should we really be surprised? That soldiers who return from killing fields abroad should find it so easy to kill again, even upon returning home? To quote columnist Robert Jamieson from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “when you ask people to go to war, you can fully expect that a fraction will be incapable of turning off the killing switch”.
The controversy over the New York Times investigation centres on its numbers. Right-wing bloggers have taken their lead from (retired) Colonel Ralph Peters in the New York Post who claims the Times is “smearing soldiers” and argues that, compared to the non-military civilian population, returning US troops are “five times less likely to commit a murder” than their peers. Peters may be right, in a strictly numerical sense, but he misses the wider point. The New York Times claims nowhere in the article that returning or retired US combat troops are more likely to commit murder or manslaughter than their non-military counterparts in the wider population – it simply highlights the increasing numbers of US military personnel who are engaging in such violent and criminal acts.
In fact...
“…The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower."
Do the New York Post and its right-wing allies really believe that an almost 90% increase in the number of homicides carried out by military veterans is not worthy of being front-page news? Or should not be the subject of a legitimate journalistic investigation?
The fundamental fact remains that the New York Times piece drew much-needed (and belated) attention to the post-traumatic stress suffered by young, impressionable and often ill-educated and gung-ho American GIs who have been sent out to fight a foreign war of conquest on a false prospectus by those in Washington D.C. (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) who hypocritically spent their entire lives avoiding military service and who often found novel and intriguing excuses for opting out of their own generation’s war, in Vietnam (Dick Cheney: “I had other priorities in the 60s than military service”).
Also overlooked by the rest of the media is how many of these psychic scars, which continue to blight the hundreds of thousands of US military personnel who have returned home from tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, are the result of being wracked by guilt for having killed innocent Iraqis or innocent Afghans. The Times tells the tragic and shocking story of one such individual, 27-year old soldier Seth Strasburg:
"In 2004, Sergeant Strasburg’s section was engaged in a mission to counter a proliferation of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, on the road west of Mosul. One night, posted in an old junked bus, he watched the road for hours until an Iraqi man, armed and out after curfew, appeared and circled a field, kicking the dirt as if he were searching for something. Finally, the man bent down, straining to pick up a large white flour sack, which he then dragged toward the road.
“In my mind at the time, he had this I.E.D. hidden out there during the day and he was going to set it in place,” Mr. Strasburg said. “We radioed it in. They said, ‘Whatever, use your discretion.’ So I popped him.”
With others on his reconnaissance team, Mr. Strasburg helped zip the man into a body bag, taking a few minutes to study the face that he now cannot forget. When they went to search the flour sack, they found nothing but gravel.
“I reported the kill to the battalion,” Mr. Strasburg said. “They said, you know: ‘Good shot. It’s legal. Whatever. Don’t worry about it.’ After that, it was never mentioned. But, you know, I had some issues with it later.”
“Some” issues? Strasburg returned home from Iraq in 2005, irritable and prickly, with the death on his conscience, and ended up shooting and killing 21-year student Thomas Varney after a minor altercation outside a party in his hometown of Arnold, Nebraska. He is currently serving a prison term of 22 to 36 years for his crime. But, in the simplistic and amoral (immoral?) eyes of his superiors back in Iraq: “Whatever. Don’t worry about it”.
Personally, I would like the United States Department of Defense to issue questionnaires to every soldier returning from Iraq, with the very first question being: “Did you kill an innocent Iraqi? Someone who turned out not to be an insurgent or a terrorist or a Baathist or a criminal or an Iraqi soldier?” Then I would like the DoD to release the results of that questionnaire. I dare them.
SIDEBAR: At least soldiers on the ground can see the innocents they accidentally (or even intentionally) shoot and kill – at checkpoints, in drive-bys, during home raids, etc. But what about US pilots in Iraq? Do they have any clue how many casualties they are causing? It’s much easier to inflict death and destruction from far up in the skies, far from the scene of the crime. In fact, a week ago, the Pentagon admitted to having unleashed one of the biggest air strikes of the war so far, dropping an astonishing 40,000 pounds (!) of bombs on buildings and roads on the southern outskirts of Baghdad in the space of just ten minutes. A military spokesman claimed the bombs “flattened…safe havens for Al Qaida in Iraq”. And how many civilian casualties? We simply don’t know and perhaps may never know. But, rest assured, our pilots and our troops are not the same as terrorists. In the words of author William Blum, “A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force”.
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