How to create PTSD
May. 15th, 2006 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gizaThe below post was made by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ginmar, and I thought it was worth sharing. It has been reproduced with her permission.
Oh I almost forgot:
ginmar, and I thought it was worth sharing. It has been reproduced with her permission.Here's how you can create the perfect environment for PTSD.
Take a war where there is no rear, where attacks on all soldiers are sporadic and unpredictable. In safe zones, make sure you have high-ranking service members get murdered---sometimes on their first day in country. Bombard them with mortars all the time. There should be gunfire all the time. Make sure the roads are mined so that merely leaving the gate is an exercise in wrestling with fate.
Add to that a confusing mission that consists of nebulous goals and poor execution. Talk about turning the corner a lot to the troops, when they're the ones who watch their buddies get killed. Talk about missions accomplished when the bombs go off every day, when dozens of people are executed by death squads every day.
When I was in Iraq, I got told a story my first day, when we pulled into post and the Marine flag was flying at half staff. (At my reserve unit, they've just reached the point where they never lift the flag from half mast at all.) A guy who'd been there one day had been driven around the city, and at a stop sign, someone came up to the vehicle and shot him in the back of the head.
You get tips all day long, and it's impossible to check out which ones are true and which ones are false. You round people up on the basis of tips, try and see if they have information, and then they get released. People turn in their old enemies, their old rivals, or people who might expose them. Innocent people go to jail. Weapons are everywhere. The security forces are infiltrated with insurgents, as is the Army. Every day one of your soldiers died, along with ten or twnety or more civilians. Mortars fall constantly. The heat strips the flesh from your bones, and the stress, the unknown, makes thinking of the next day impossible. You might not be alive the next day.
One wrong move, and you might create an insurgent, or miss one. You get woken up by mortars and gunfire. You don't see an end in sight, or what the end will look like, or what it will accomplish.
Maybe you agreed with the war, maybe you didn't. But you served, because that's what you do. Maybe you get cynical, maybe you cling to your ideals. But you don't know what's going to happen, what the plan is, and you know one thing: it's the enemy who's in control, not you, and they're the ones who are acting, while you are reacting. Numbers don't matter. Unless you can flip those two positions around, you're not winning.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Come home to a culture that makes heroes out of those with visible wounds, while at the same time it shudders delicately at the sight. Supporting the troops takes the form of cutting their benefits and leaving them damaged from the war. Supporting the troops isn't about the troops at all; it's about the illusions of the people who want to send them away. Their denial can be preserved only by denying the troops. Meanwhile, military culture is stuck between an old army and a new army.
In the old army, you could count on your buddies, your leadership, your cadre. There are lots of pockets of that out there still, and it's for those people that you fight. But the new army is run like a corporation, and the wounded and the damaged become percentages. We all know about maximizing profit and minimizing loss, right? What exactly are we losing here?
Take a war where there is no rear, where attacks on all soldiers are sporadic and unpredictable. In safe zones, make sure you have high-ranking service members get murdered---sometimes on their first day in country. Bombard them with mortars all the time. There should be gunfire all the time. Make sure the roads are mined so that merely leaving the gate is an exercise in wrestling with fate.
Add to that a confusing mission that consists of nebulous goals and poor execution. Talk about turning the corner a lot to the troops, when they're the ones who watch their buddies get killed. Talk about missions accomplished when the bombs go off every day, when dozens of people are executed by death squads every day.
When I was in Iraq, I got told a story my first day, when we pulled into post and the Marine flag was flying at half staff. (At my reserve unit, they've just reached the point where they never lift the flag from half mast at all.) A guy who'd been there one day had been driven around the city, and at a stop sign, someone came up to the vehicle and shot him in the back of the head.
You get tips all day long, and it's impossible to check out which ones are true and which ones are false. You round people up on the basis of tips, try and see if they have information, and then they get released. People turn in their old enemies, their old rivals, or people who might expose them. Innocent people go to jail. Weapons are everywhere. The security forces are infiltrated with insurgents, as is the Army. Every day one of your soldiers died, along with ten or twnety or more civilians. Mortars fall constantly. The heat strips the flesh from your bones, and the stress, the unknown, makes thinking of the next day impossible. You might not be alive the next day.
One wrong move, and you might create an insurgent, or miss one. You get woken up by mortars and gunfire. You don't see an end in sight, or what the end will look like, or what it will accomplish.
Maybe you agreed with the war, maybe you didn't. But you served, because that's what you do. Maybe you get cynical, maybe you cling to your ideals. But you don't know what's going to happen, what the plan is, and you know one thing: it's the enemy who's in control, not you, and they're the ones who are acting, while you are reacting. Numbers don't matter. Unless you can flip those two positions around, you're not winning.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Come home to a culture that makes heroes out of those with visible wounds, while at the same time it shudders delicately at the sight. Supporting the troops takes the form of cutting their benefits and leaving them damaged from the war. Supporting the troops isn't about the troops at all; it's about the illusions of the people who want to send them away. Their denial can be preserved only by denying the troops. Meanwhile, military culture is stuck between an old army and a new army.
In the old army, you could count on your buddies, your leadership, your cadre. There are lots of pockets of that out there still, and it's for those people that you fight. But the new army is run like a corporation, and the wounded and the damaged become percentages. We all know about maximizing profit and minimizing loss, right? What exactly are we losing here?
Oh I almost forgot:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 11:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 12:12 am (UTC)That's what I get for trying to figure out genders based on LJ user icons!
I updated my post accordingly.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 12:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 01:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 05:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 01:50 pm (UTC)I'd say that the man is a bully, but that's not quite accurate. Our whole country has a history of bullying around smaller countries, even going back to Clinton and other past presidents. I think it's totally fscked.
Unfortuantely, I don't know how to fix the problem either. :-(
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 07:48 pm (UTC)> the only lie here is the one you keep repeating to yourself... that somehow,
> if we were just *nicer* to everyone everything would be fine;
Now you're just misrepresenting my viewpoint. You can attack my viewpoints, and you can attack my friends' viewpoints. But when you accuse me of holding a viewpoint I don't have, that's what I draw the line.
I think it's time you took an enforced vacation from posting here.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 11:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 02:16 pm (UTC)Case in point, look at the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretaps. They're presumably to fight "terrorism", but it's way to easy to abuse them, with there being no oversight anymore.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 10:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 07:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 10:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 12:01 am (UTC)I tend to skim over such comments from people that I am pissed at. And if I see that they post regularly in another LJ, I may invoke my anti-asshatery defense mechanism (http://giza.livejournal.com/253518.html).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 08:25 am (UTC)I will be trying to submit the suggestion idea to the LJ people; possibly, if I have time, I'll look into writing the patch myself (although... eek, Perl!). If that doesn't work out, I imagine a Greasemonkey script would do. I would have to stop peeking at LJ from work in w3m, but that might actually be a good thing. :}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 07:23 pm (UTC)That's not what the Bush Administration tried telling us in 2003 (http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24970).
"This is about imminent threat."
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03
"Well, of course he is.”
• White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett responding to the question “is Saddam an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?”, 1/26/03
"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02
So which one is it? Was there an imminent threat or wasn't there?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 02:02 pm (UTC)Trust me..I know how this can be..I may not have been in Iraq. But I was at a stressful place. I lost buddys overseas. Just last week I lost another friend to a roadside bomb...ya..Mission accomplished....
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 02:41 am (UTC)