[Fresh Ink] Dahr Jamail: Endless War: The Suicide of the United States

[Richard Menec]

http://www.truthout.org/081109A

Endless War: The Suicide of the United States

Wednesday 05 August 2009

by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

A US soldier looks through netting at a medical tent in Logar Province, 
Afghanistan, on July 23. (Photo: Reuters)

"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. »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "The Will to 
Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan," (Haymarket 
Books, 2009), and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded 
Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from 
occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and 
Turkey over the last five years.