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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 4/15/11

The Battle Over PTSD

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In an article on the CDP website called "Meaning-making, PTSD, and Combat Experiences," (2) Priscilla Schulz, a senior PTSD treatment trainer, says the DOD prefers the term "Combat stress injury" to PTSD, since that preferred term "sets an expectation that the disturbance is transitory."

 

She mentions speaking with a Marine who fought in the WWII Battle of Okinawa. "After a while he asked, almost incredulous, "What kind of person kills another human being?!' " A few moments later he shrugged and said, "but, what are you going to do? If you don't kill them, they're going to kill you!' "

 

Then she closes the article this way: "Memories of traumatic events are enduring. Meaning matters. Let's help troops, who need help, grapple with their experiences by looking at the whole story, including the patriotism that brought them to a war zone, and the heroism they practice every day in the performance of their duties."

 

This gets at the crux of the problem. World War Two is a war few Americans have any interest in questioning, and, of course, in war, you have to kill people before they kill you. No argument. That's basic Patton: "Make the other poor slob die for his country." But, then, Ms Schulz jumps ahead in history 65 years to 2011, as if the current array of wars were remotely like WWII with a similar civilian consensus behind them. She pleads with us to look "at the whole story," but everything she says makes it clear she does not really want that.

 

For one, "the whole story" about Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya is rife with delusion, dishonesty and military face-saving. And two, it's impossible for an American to look at "the whole story" because most of it is kept secret from him or her. Ironically, to really get "the whole story" about our current foreign wars, journalists would have to assume a posture akin to WikiLeaks and depend on sources like Bradley Manning, who is now being held in a solitary confinement cell in Quantico Marine Brig. A week does not go by that at least two references to WikiLeaks material appear buried in a New York Times story on US policy abroad. For an American citizen to really seek "the whole story" under the current in-group, out-group professional military as described by Dr. Riggs, one faces the danger of being branded a subversive.

 

The point is, the current professional, warrior-class military that Dr Riggs proselytizes about is to many Americans a frightening reality that is getting worse. As he was leaving the presidency in 1961, General Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation to "beware the military-industrial complex." He was talking about the condition we find ourselves in right now.

 

On the other side of the struggle for meaning in the realm of war trauma are those who see a soldier's war trauma as a psychological and existential issue of his or her relationship with life in general. From this vantage point focused on recovery and reintegration into civilian life, there may be a very good reason for   a Moral Injury from one's deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. And that reason may be the immoral nature of the tasks we often ask our young men and women to undertake while there.

 

Again, Iraq and Afghanistan are not World War Two; they are asymmetrical foreign wars of choice now running significantly on their own insidious momentum. There's a perfectly logical reason why the United States has refused to join the International Criminal Court. While the American government assumes a holier-than-thou posture and suggests we will not be part of the ICC to avoid the danger that some party might use the court against us, the fact is the US government feels US soldiers in some cases could be internationally prosecuted under the ICC. There is a very real moral issue at play in deploying soldiers to these war zones. In the case of Moral Injury and other types of war trauma, the wars themselves and their advocates are the facilitators; and the policy of re-deploying soldiers with PTSD issues needs to be reconsidered.

 

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I'm a 72-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a naive 19-year-old. From that moment on, I've been studying and re-thinking what US counter-insurgency war means. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I'm a writer, photographer and political (more...)
 

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