TommyTooter
Banned
The Wounded Home Front Robert D. Kaplan
Covering the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, I learned that most of the land mines that the Soviets laid were designed to maim, not kill. The Soviets knew that a dead body causes no tactical inconvenience. It only removes the one dead person from the field. But a wounded person requires the assistance of people all the way down the line who could otherwise be fighting. Likewise with the home front in a war. The dead leave an awful vacancy in the lives of loved ones, but those who are seriously wounded or psychologically traumatized can disrupt families and society more. Families of the dead can move on, as difficult as it may be, and as awful as it may be to say; the families of the seriously maimed, physically or psychologically, never can.
Army Col. Ross Brown, a squadron commander in Iraq, told me this story:
The long tail of suffering that extends from the war front to the home front, and from dead and wounded soldiers and marines, sailors and airmen, to their wives and children, and to their children’s children, is statistically numbing and heartrending. Of the 2.2 million American troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, several hundred thousand have sustained physical and psychological wounds. The figures of 4,417 dead from Iraq and 1,368 from Afghanistan (as of November 10, 2010) are well-known and oft-quoted. But the physically wounded from both wars number more than 40,000, a staggering number, and roughly three-quarters of them have been wounded in a serious life- and family-affecting way. According to the Army Office of the Surgeon General, between 2001 and 2009 doctors performed 1,286 amputations, three-quarters of which were of major limbs.
Then there are the psychological wounds, to which Col. Brown’s story attests. Between 20 and 35 percent of deployed troops test positive for depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. More than 100,000 soldiers today are on prescribed anti-anxiety medication, and 40,000 are thought by the Army to be using drugs illicitly. At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug. The effect on wives and children is immense. There have been around 25,000 cases of domestic violence in military families in the past decade: 20 percent of married troops returning from deployment are planning a divorce. Problems in family relationships are reportedly four times higher following a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. In families where one of the spouses is deployed, instances of child abuse are 40 percent higher than the norm. In 2009 alone, 74,646 criminal offenses were committed by soldiers.
In 2009 alone there were 334 military suicides. Marine Corps suicides are now 24 per 100,000, compared to 20 in the civilian population. Eighteen veterans a day die by their own hand. As for active duty troops, Berglass says they are taking their own lives at the rate of one every 36 hours. These may not seem like such high numbers, but keep in mind that in the 1990s the Army and other armed services were touted as the most disciplined and psychologically healthiest sector of the population.
Then there is homelessness. Homelessness is only partly a sign of insufficient financial means. At a deeper level it can be about the inability to cope with the complexities of modern life following a period of sustained trauma. Veterans for America estimates that 10,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are now homeless. During the Vietnam War, the number of homeless veterans exceeded the number of fatalities (58,000), and experts have told me that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are becoming homeless at a quicker rate than those of Vietnam. One third of the adult homeless population are veterans, even as veterans represent only 11 percent of the population.
Furthermore, young male veterans of the Iraq War had an unemployment rate of 21.6 percent in 2009, more than double that of the general population. Foreclosure rates in military towns are running at four times the national average. Then there are the rates of underwater mortgages, in which the family owes more on the loan than the value of the house. There are no adequate statistics for this regarding the military, but experts assume the rate is much higher than for the civilian population because war means deployments, and deployments mean moving locations at a quicker rate than in a peacetime Army. That, in turn, leads to more disadvantageous house purchases. I have heard stories of returning wounded veterans with amputated limbs who have trouble finding jobs and whose mortgages are in foreclosure or underwater. Though these stories may seem apocryphal, they make unmistakable sense given the other statistics. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales indicates that such statistics are central to what “land warfare does to a ground force.” Too few troops have been carrying too heavy a burden for too long, he told Government Executive reporter Katherine McIntire Peters. There was a debate back in the dark days of 2006, when America’s land forces were suffering their highest numbers of casualties, about whether Iraq would break the Army. Such numbers indicate that it has already done so, at least partially.
Edith Wharton, in a somewhat obscure antiwar classic, A Son at the Front (1923), writes of war’s “jaded appetite”, of “the monster’s daily meal”, devouring all the “gifts and virtues”, “brains in the bud”, “imagination and poetry”, of so many young men. But at least Wharton is writing about World War I in France, where there is an authentic home front to which the wounded and traumatized can return, where all of society is “swept” into the great effort, compared to which all else is trivial. So the hotels and households of the rich are “shrunken” and “understaffed.” Hallways in Paris are “piled with hospital supplies.” Every family has someone at the front: War is the subject of nearly every conversation. Indeed, the cruelest fate for the seriously wounded and those psychologically oppressed by awful memories is to return to a civilian society with distinctly other matters on its mind. For unlike the war Wharton wrote about, we in America famously constitute an army at war and a nation at the mall.
Covering the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, I learned that most of the land mines that the Soviets laid were designed to maim, not kill. The Soviets knew that a dead body causes no tactical inconvenience. It only removes the one dead person from the field. But a wounded person requires the assistance of people all the way down the line who could otherwise be fighting. Likewise with the home front in a war. The dead leave an awful vacancy in the lives of loved ones, but those who are seriously wounded or psychologically traumatized can disrupt families and society more. Families of the dead can move on, as difficult as it may be, and as awful as it may be to say; the families of the seriously maimed, physically or psychologically, never can.
Army Col. Ross Brown, a squadron commander in Iraq, told me this story:
After a suicide bomber killed four of my soldiers, my Command Sergeant-Major (CSM) and I spent a night picking up their body parts. I walked around one side of the blast area while my CSM covered the other side. An 18-year-old soldier walked behind me towing a body bag. As I came upon a limb or other body part, I would place it in the bag and move on to the next body part. After six hours of walking the blast radius, I had a full bag. Although I knew the soldier beside me was young, and even as I tried to protect the youngest soldiers from seeing such terrible things, I had to use him to assist me that evening. The next day I had him see a psychologist, and had him see one again after we returned from Iraq. However, less than a year later, I signed paperwork releasing him from the Army for post-traumatic stress disorder and long term psychological damage.
To be sure, the dead and the psychologically wounded of that terrible evening will have ripple effects upon their families and the larger society for years to come. And this is merely one story. Nancy Berglass, director of the Iraq-Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund, says “hundreds of thousands of active duty and former active duty troops are dealing with significant mental health [and drug dependence] problems that have not been adequately addressed.” In each instance of psychological disturbance, there is a story, perhaps as bad as Col. Brown’s, behind it.
The long tail of suffering that extends from the war front to the home front, and from dead and wounded soldiers and marines, sailors and airmen, to their wives and children, and to their children’s children, is statistically numbing and heartrending. Of the 2.2 million American troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, several hundred thousand have sustained physical and psychological wounds. The figures of 4,417 dead from Iraq and 1,368 from Afghanistan (as of November 10, 2010) are well-known and oft-quoted. But the physically wounded from both wars number more than 40,000, a staggering number, and roughly three-quarters of them have been wounded in a serious life- and family-affecting way. According to the Army Office of the Surgeon General, between 2001 and 2009 doctors performed 1,286 amputations, three-quarters of which were of major limbs.
Then there are the psychological wounds, to which Col. Brown’s story attests. Between 20 and 35 percent of deployed troops test positive for depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. More than 100,000 soldiers today are on prescribed anti-anxiety medication, and 40,000 are thought by the Army to be using drugs illicitly. At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug. The effect on wives and children is immense. There have been around 25,000 cases of domestic violence in military families in the past decade: 20 percent of married troops returning from deployment are planning a divorce. Problems in family relationships are reportedly four times higher following a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. In families where one of the spouses is deployed, instances of child abuse are 40 percent higher than the norm. In 2009 alone, 74,646 criminal offenses were committed by soldiers.
In 2009 alone there were 334 military suicides. Marine Corps suicides are now 24 per 100,000, compared to 20 in the civilian population. Eighteen veterans a day die by their own hand. As for active duty troops, Berglass says they are taking their own lives at the rate of one every 36 hours. These may not seem like such high numbers, but keep in mind that in the 1990s the Army and other armed services were touted as the most disciplined and psychologically healthiest sector of the population.
Then there is homelessness. Homelessness is only partly a sign of insufficient financial means. At a deeper level it can be about the inability to cope with the complexities of modern life following a period of sustained trauma. Veterans for America estimates that 10,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are now homeless. During the Vietnam War, the number of homeless veterans exceeded the number of fatalities (58,000), and experts have told me that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are becoming homeless at a quicker rate than those of Vietnam. One third of the adult homeless population are veterans, even as veterans represent only 11 percent of the population.
Furthermore, young male veterans of the Iraq War had an unemployment rate of 21.6 percent in 2009, more than double that of the general population. Foreclosure rates in military towns are running at four times the national average. Then there are the rates of underwater mortgages, in which the family owes more on the loan than the value of the house. There are no adequate statistics for this regarding the military, but experts assume the rate is much higher than for the civilian population because war means deployments, and deployments mean moving locations at a quicker rate than in a peacetime Army. That, in turn, leads to more disadvantageous house purchases. I have heard stories of returning wounded veterans with amputated limbs who have trouble finding jobs and whose mortgages are in foreclosure or underwater. Though these stories may seem apocryphal, they make unmistakable sense given the other statistics. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales indicates that such statistics are central to what “land warfare does to a ground force.” Too few troops have been carrying too heavy a burden for too long, he told Government Executive reporter Katherine McIntire Peters. There was a debate back in the dark days of 2006, when America’s land forces were suffering their highest numbers of casualties, about whether Iraq would break the Army. Such numbers indicate that it has already done so, at least partially.
Edith Wharton, in a somewhat obscure antiwar classic, A Son at the Front (1923), writes of war’s “jaded appetite”, of “the monster’s daily meal”, devouring all the “gifts and virtues”, “brains in the bud”, “imagination and poetry”, of so many young men. But at least Wharton is writing about World War I in France, where there is an authentic home front to which the wounded and traumatized can return, where all of society is “swept” into the great effort, compared to which all else is trivial. So the hotels and households of the rich are “shrunken” and “understaffed.” Hallways in Paris are “piled with hospital supplies.” Every family has someone at the front: War is the subject of nearly every conversation. Indeed, the cruelest fate for the seriously wounded and those psychologically oppressed by awful memories is to return to a civilian society with distinctly other matters on its mind. For unlike the war Wharton wrote about, we in America famously constitute an army at war and a nation at the mall.
Rub my temples....
