Combat Stress

I’ve read many articles about the highest suicide rate in decades in our volunteer military, and about the underlying causes of it. It seems that combat stress is not the basic issue, really, but the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are without doubt the proximate cause. As you might suspect, the issue is complex, variable and difficult but overwhelmingly goes something like this:

You are young, haven’t been married very long and have a couple of kids. You’ve been moved to a strange town far from family and childhood friends. Your job involves long hours and doesn’t pay very well, so your wife works, and even with that you still need food stamps to get by.

Financial issues cause stress in your marriage. Separation stresses your marriage even more, and when you return it isn’t over as another separation looms. Your wife is angry and upset and your children are growing up without you. The military cannot tell you when, or if, it will end.

Add to that picture 15 months at a time, fifteen months, of being all but constantly in a free fire zone. Of being in a place where you can walk nowhere without weapons, body armor and constant vigilance.

The British Army has a standard of six months in combat being followed by two years at home base, a 1:4 ratio. We are currently using 15 months of combat followed by one year home based, a 5:4 ratio, and the one year home based is frequently cut short.

This is the way that our government “supports our troops.”

A Question of Ethics

Updated below

In Media Matters today LTC Bob Bateman addresses news stories of last week about the ethics of troops in Iraq. He refers, in his discussion, to this story in the San Diego Union-Tribune, which I recall reading. He then makes reference to 2002 surveys having to do with cheating and plagiarism in schools and offers an alternative to the survey results being a sign of the military forces being “broken,”

“…why is anyone at all surprised? This is not to say I condone or am trying to explain away the statistics. I am just noting that your military is the product of your society.”

I’m not sure that the two things really equate, so I don't think I agree with his premise. I do think that too much can be drawn, and is being drawn, from the recent survey and its findings.

For one thing, the sampling was pretty small. Only 1320 soldiers and 447 Marines were included in the survey, out of 150,000 serving. That’s barely over 1% of the serving force, and we do not know how typical that sample may have been. Where were they serving? What duties were they performing? How long had they been in theatre?

Polls are dangerous things. Before one starts reading a high level of gravitas into them one needs to be sure that the sampling is sufficient and that it is in reality representative. I don’t think we really have that here, and I think the results should be viewed with a certain amount of caution.

This survey was made after four years of war, and much of the conclusion being drawn seems to be that the prolonged exposure to war is lowering the ethics of our troops. I wonder, though, what the results would have been if the survey had been made three years earlier? And no, I am not suggesting that our troops are “bad guys.”

What I’m saying is that war is a “bad thing.”

In the days of Ghengis Kahn the warrior didn’t even attempt to distinguish between armed enemy and unarmed noncombatant, he slaughtered anyone who came in front him. Today we want our wars to be more civilized than that, but that is a contradiction in terms. War is what happens when civilization has failed.

We expect our soldier to go in harm’s way, to expose himself to the risk of being killed or maimed for life, but to be courteous in all his conduct in the theatre of war?

Whether or not this particular war needs to be fought is irrelevant at the moment. It has been compared to Viet Nam in too many ways, please God do not let us start down this road and begin to question the ethics of the soldiers fighting it. Bad things happen in war because they are the nature of war. You cannot sanitize war because you cannot sanitize killing. The only way to prevent the Hadithas, the My Lais, the Dresdens is to prevent war itself.

You and I at home enjoy the ethics of society.

Soldiers live with the ethics of war.

Update, May 11, 10:50 AM

No, I am not suggesting that any specific behavior is okay or not okay. What I am suggesting is that we should not sit here safe at home sipping our Starbucks and second-guessing the actions or ethics of soldiers who are under fire.

Condemn the war if you must, but do not even think about condemning the soldiers who are fighting it. Not to me.