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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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12 August 2009 By Dahr Jamail “We hear war
called murder. It is not: it is suicide.” - Ramsay
MacDonald, British prime minister 1931-1935
Sergio Kochergin, back home from his second deployment
in Iraq, held a gun in his mouth, trying to muster the
courage to pull the trigger. Untreated post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) and accompanying nightmares and
insomnia, heavy substance abuse, and several failed
attempts at self-medication had taken their toll on
him. He was in an apartment he shared with a friend in
Texarkana, Texas, after having spent the past few
months with his parents, where he “was drinking too
much and causing too much trouble, breaking things,
flipping out every day, and cursing at them.”
The decision to end his life came in early 2007, from
a desperate need for relief and to avoid deployment
back to Iraq. Although Kochergin’s contract had
expired, it would have taken more than six months for
him to be medically discharged from the military, a
period during which he was sure to be redeployed.
A year later, describing his aborted attempt to me,
Kochergin said, “I had a .40-caliber in my mouth for a
long time, trying to ?gure out the right thing to do.
Should I put an end to this suffering or should I
allow it to continue to torment me? Fortunately, I
fell asleep and woke up the next morning. My roommate
came in and fucking flipped out on me and took the gun
away to his parents’ house. I stepped out, and with a
deep breath of air I was like, ‘Man, this is way too
good to just throw away.’ After that, I decided I had
to do something. That’s when it sunk in that there’s
no point running away. I must start dealing with it
and do something and that kind of pushed me up.”
At the time we met, Kochergin had seized the moment of
hope that came his way and managed to ?nd a
constructive route out of his suffering and possible
redeployment. Thousands of others never get or grab
that chance.
On July 26, the Colorado Springs Gazette ran a story
headlined “Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war
comes home.” The article highlighted what is happening
to soldiers upon their return from the occupation of
Iraq. It begins:
Before the murders started, Anthony Marquez’s mom
dialed his sergeant at Fort Carson to warn that her
son was poised to kill.
It was February 2006, and the 21-year-old soldier had
not been the same since being wounded and coming home
from Iraq eight months before. He had violent
outbursts and thrashing nightmares. He was devouring
pain pills and drinking too much. He always packed a
gun.
“It was a dangerous combination. I told them he was a
walking time bomb,” said his mother, Teresa Hernandez.
His sergeant told her there was nothing he could do.
Then, she said, he started taunting her son, saying
things like, “Your mommy called. She says you are
going crazy.”
Eight months later, the time bomb exploded when her
son used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time
drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana,
then shot him through the heart.
Marquez was the first infantry soldier in his brigade
to murder someone after returning from Iraq. But he
wasn’t the last.
Marquez, like many others in his brigade, returned
home scarred from war, suffering the ravages of PTSD.
He, like his fellow soldiers, began to murder
civilians and each other, drive around and shoot at
people, beat their former girlfriends to death, rape,
kidnap, brawl, deal drugs, stab people, commit
suicide, and self-medicate via alcohol and drugs.
From 2007 to 2008, the murder rate for his brigade,
the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team,
was 114 times that of Colorado Springs.
Soldiers are returning from the occupations of Iraq
and Afghanistan destroyed mentally, spiritually, and
psychologically, to a general population that is,
mostly, willfully ignorant of the occupations and the
soldiers participating in them. Troops face a
Department of Veterans Affairs that is either
unwilling or unable to help them with their physical
and psychological wounds, and they are left to fend
for themselves. It is a perfect storm of denial,
neglect, violence, rage, suffering, and death.
Veterans are roaming the country wrought with PTSD.
They are armed and dangerous. They are killers.
One of the soldiers in the Gazette article served two
tours in Iraq and returned home, like Kochergin,
“depressed, paranoid, violent, abusing drugs and
haunted by nightmares. But because he was
other-than-honorably discharged, he said, he was
ineligible for benefits or health care. He was no
longer Uncle Sam’s problem. He was on his own.
“I had no job training,” he said. “All I know how to
do is kill people.”
Ten infantrymen in his brigade have been arrested and
accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter
since 2006. Others have committed or attempted
suicide.
What is happening to the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th
Brigade Combat Team is true of literally hundreds of
thousands of veterans across the US.
There are numerous instances of veterans attempting to
kill themselves after they return from their
deployments. Some of these incidents seem to be an
effort to avoid redeployment. Many more look like
desperate bids to stop, once and for all, the internal
pain that many veterans experience.
After witnessing atrocities in Sadr City in Baghdad,
Kristopher Goldsmith had returned home shattered, only
to learn he was being stop-lossed and redeployed to
Iraq. Testifying on the panel “Breakdown of the
Military” at a Winter Soldier event in Silver Spring,
Maryland, Goldsmith gave an account of his response to
the news:
The moment I learned that, I swung from being the
happiest I had ever been in my life to the most
depressed. My joy had come from the sense of relief I
felt at the thought of being released from the prison
called the Army. When that prospect receded, I
experienced the most depressing, most agonizing
downward spiral I could imagine anyone going through.
I was to be redeployed the same week as I had hoped to
be discharged, as per my contract, and that was in May
of 2007. The day before I … was supposed to deploy,
Memorial Day, I went out onto a field in Fort Stewart
where there’s a memoriam, a tree planted for every
soldier in the Third Infantry Division who has died. I
went out among those fallen soldiers and tried to take
my own life. I took pills, and I went back to my
regular poison of vodka, and drank until I couldn’t
drink anymore. The next thing I knew, I was handcuffed
to a gurney in the hospital. The cops had found me and
literally dragged my body into an ambulance, threw me
in there, and locked me up. I spent a week in a mental
ward - now mind you I was diagnosed because I had ?nally
sought mental health. I thought I was having a heart
attack. I believed myself to be strong, but on hearing
I was stop-lossed I started having panic attacks and I
couldn’t admit that I was mentally or emotionally
broken. So I went into the hospital complaining of
chest pain and they had me seek a mental-health
professional. They diagnosed me with depression and
anxiety disorder, and adjustment disorder. But I was
still set to be deployed, obviously [a] broken
soldier, but set to deploy.
Goldsmith’s ordeal did not end there. He ultimately
obtained a general discharge from the military, but
the papers cited the reasons for discharge as,
“Misconduct, serious offense.” The irony was not lost
on the audience when Goldsmith said:
My serious offense was trying to kill myself because I
was so damaged by the war - the occupation in Iraq. It
was misconduct for me not to get on the ?ight while I
was chained or handcuffed to a bed in the hospital. So
I lost my college benefits, the one thing that had
really given me hope in life that I was looking for -
you know, I was gonna be a student, I didn’t know
where, I didn’t know what I was gonna study, but I
knew I was going to college in September of ‘07. That
didn’t happen. My money is disappearing between VA
visits and personal instability. I’ve found it
extremely hard to ?nd a job. To tell you the truth, I
haven’t really looked because I’m having a rough time.
So I deliver pizzas on Wednesdays, that’s what I am
now, a pizza delivery boy. I was a sergeant, I was a
leader, I was a trainer, I was very well thought of. I
was one of the most professional soldiers…. I mean I
got the paperwork right here in front of me if anyone
ever wants to see the proof that I was a very good
soldier. But now I’m a pizza delivery boy who works
once a week because that’s the only job where I can
call in a couple hours before and say, “I’m still at
the VA, I’m waiting in line. I’m sorry I can’t come in
for a couple hours.”
I interviewed Goldsmith shortly after his testimony.
“War is a really destructive thing,” he told me. “It
follows you home. And it doesn’t go away.”
What kind of homes filled with the specter of a
distant war will this country be filled with as more
of our broken, wounded, and destroyed soldiers are
brought back?
* * *
In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a
stunning report revealing, “Nearly 20 percent of
military service members who have returned from Iraq
and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all - report symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression,
yet only slightly more than half have sought
treatment.”
The situation continues to worsen. In the six months
leading up to March 31, 2008,
1,467 veterans died while waiting to learn if their
disability claim would be approved by the government.
The average duration of an appeal pending a VA
decision on disability claims is 1,608 days, which
amounts to nearly four and a half years.
As a result, the suffering of returning vets is
compounded by the agonizing wait. In 2007, the Army’s
official suicide count was 115, the most since the
Pentagon began keeping suicide statistics in 1980. In
2008, it rose to 133, and 2009 is currently on track
to set yet another grim record.
Meanwhile, the military continues to attempt to
conceal the depth of the crisis.
When the Pentagon reports the number of US troops
wounded in Iraq (just over 31,000), it fails to
mention that it tracks two other categories of
injuries: “injured” (10,180) and “ill” (28,451). All
three groups comprise soldiers who have to be
medically evacuated to Germany for treatment.
When the VA will not deliver the necessary care, many
veterans turn to alcohol and drugs for
self-medication. In the Pentagon’s recent
post-deployment survey of health-related behavior,
released in November 2007, of 88,235 soldiers surveyed
three to six months after returning, 12 percent of
active-duty troops and 15 percent of reservists
acknowledged having problems with alcohol.
The more fortunate among the troops do not need to
self-medicate. The military does it for them, in order
to keep enough boots on the ground. The dual objective
of medicating soldiers is to steady their nerves and
to enable an already troop-starved military to retain
soldiers on the front lines. Mark Thompson reports in
Time magazine, “Data contained in the Army’s fifth
Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that,
according to an anonymous survey of US troops taken
last fall, about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq
and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking
prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help
them cope.”
Sergeant Christopher LeJeune has firsthand experience
of this “treatment.” He was diagnosed with depression,
and the military doctor he consulted sent him back
into the field with the antidepressant Zoloft and an
anti-anxiety drug called clonazepam. He says in the
Time article, “It’s not easy for soldiers to admit the
problems that they’re having over there for a variety
of reasons. If they do admit it, then the only
solution given is pills.”
Two out of five suicide victims among troops in Iraq
and Afghanistan have been found to be on
antidepressants.
* * *
At the Northwest Regional Winter Soldier event at the
Seattle Town Hall in June 2008, psychiatrist Dr. Evan
Kanter, president-elect of Physicians for Social
Responsibility, spoke at length to the 800-member
audience about the crippling impact that the
occupation has had on the mental health of the forces.
Dr. Kanter specializes in treating vets with PTSD.
Physicians for Social Responsibility is an
organization that has vigorously opposed the
occupation of Iraq since before the invasion was
launched.
The ratio of wounded to killed in Iraq is much higher
than in previous con?icts, and is a far more accurate
measure of the scale of violence in the country than
the tally of combat deaths. In Iraq, the ratio is 8 to
1, compared to Vietnam, where it was 3 to 1, or World
War II, where it was 2 to 1. The reasons for this are
the twofold advance in body armor and in battlefeld
medicine. Today we can stabilize and airlift people to
Landstuhl Air Force Base in Germany within twenty-four
hours, whereas in Vietnam it would have taken weeks
for those treated in the field to be taken out for
proper medical care. As a consequence, we now have
service members with dreadful injuries who would never
have survived similar conditions in an earlier battle.
We, as a society, will be bearing the cost of caring
for these grievously injured veterans for the rest of
their lives.
Dr. Kanter added that, considering that the US has now
deployed well over 1.8 million personnel, so far, to
serve in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan,
“looking at the PTSD and major depression cases alone
will give you three to four hundred thousand
psychiatric casualties.”
According to Dr. Kanter, these “psychiatric
casualties” have a direct link with the high suicide
rates in the military. He added:
PTSD is no less a war wound than a shrapnel injury. It
can be tremendously debilitating. Symptoms include
nightmares and flashbacks, triggered physiological and
psychological stress, social withdrawal, isolation,
avoidance of any kind of reminders of the trauma,
emotional numbing, uncontrolled outbursts of anger or
rage, difficulty concentrating and focusing, and a
state of hypervigilance, which the military calls the
“battle mind.” All these are symptoms that would make
it impossible for a vet with severe PTSD to be in the
room with us today. Studies that go back to the Second
World War have found that combat veterans are twice as
likely to commit suicide as people in the general
population. Other lesser-known distressing facts are
that 9 percent of all unemployment in the United
States is attributed to combat exposure, as is 8
percent of all divorce or separation, and 21 percent
of all spousal or partner abuse. The impact of all
this extends to behavioral problems in children, child
abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, incarceration, and
homelessness, all of which have implications that go
well beyond the individual and reverberate across
generations.
* * *
Cpl. Bryan Casler was first deployed to Iraq with the
Marines in 2003, at the time of the invasion. Posted
to Afghanistan in 2004, he returned to Iraq for
another tour of duty in 2005. His experience reveals a
good example of the suffering soldiers face upon
returning home, as well as the military’s attempts to
redeploy those who are unfit for duty.
Casler suffers from chronic PTSD. He has nightmares
and grinds his teeth so badly that he dislocated his
jaw.
He told me:
“I’m still on edge 24/7. I have trouble being in
social environments. I never thought of myself as
suicidal, and I still don’t, but for the past few
months there have been points where I was driving and
I would close my eyes for fifteen seconds and just
think about what it would be like to crash my car into
a concrete barrier. That’s not me. I never had these
thoughts until after I got out. I just don’t feel like
myself. I was always a hopeless romantic and now I
have relationship problems. I have the greatest
girlfriend in the world and I know it’s not her fault.
I just have personal problems I have to work out.
There are just so many issues. I’m not at rest. And
there are these regrets. I think about the Iraq war
way too much. I wish I could think about my family
more than I think about Iraq. And it’s draining me. I
can’t focus in class. I can’t focus at a job. I was
working for a union, and I was picketing for the
union, and all I could think of was how to end this
war. I cannot attend to things that are outside the
realm of ending this war. And I don’t think it will be
complete relief, but once this war is over, that will
be a healing moment for my PTSD.”
After Casler returned home from his last deployment to
Iraq, he received a recall order from the Marines
stating that “the president had authorized some 1,400
IRR (Individual Ready Reserve) Marines to be
involuntarily mobilized.” Unable to get a school
deferment, he found himself shipped down to a
warehouse where he was reunited with approximately 250
of his peers, mostly from the infantry, who, like him,
had already served an average of two or more tours in
Iraq or Afghanistan. A general began to lecture them,
telling them to prepare to be deployed again.
The memory of that day still makes him livid: “My
hands were getting sweaty because I knew I was going
to do it (speak up)…. Every time you have someone high
ranking speak up, they say something that grabs your
lungs and just squeezes. I was like, ‘I know I can’t
keep silent, I can’t do this anymore. Fuck the Marine
Corps. I’m so sick of it. Sick of this motivated,
hoorah screw yourself over for nobody’s good
bullshit…. fucking sick of it.’”
Casler said he and his fellow marines were under
threat of the military retroactively removing their
honorable discharges, removing their health-care
benefits, removing their GI Bill, and other threats,
if they did not obey the order to redeploy.
One of his fellow soldiers, who was about to be
redeployed despite having been diagnosed with both
PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury), stood up and
asked the general, “Who in their right mind is going
to send me back to Iraq? Put a rifle in my hands, send
me out there? I’m supposed to lead Marines? You want
to put me around Iraqi civilians? I’m not stable, I
can’t do this. Who in their right minds is going to
approve me to go back?”
At the time we spoke, Casler was still in the
Individual Ready Reserve. What if he gets reactivated?
“I’m not going back.” He feels it is imperative to
continue speaking out against the occupation. It is
more than resistance to him; it is his therapy.
Of his activism against both occupations, Casler told
me, “That made me a person again. That was my
anti-boot camp. That was me becoming human.”
His is a rare success story that most veterans from
the occupations have not enjoyed.
While Casler has the opportunity to deal with his PTSD
at home while he works his way through college, the
4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team from
Fort Carson at Colorado Springs, as part of the 19,000
troops President Obama is adding to the meat-grinder
of Afghanistan, has already deployed to one of
Afghanistan’s most dangerous regions, near Khyber
Pass, this May.
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