It's discouraging to even have to post about this, but there it is:
In a fight between the Marine Corps and freedom of the press, the Marine Corps seems like it wants the win. According to Google Playfights (see gimmicky graphic illustrating this post) it already has. (Learn more about Google Playfights elsewhere: it's not central to this post.)
Following the recently-embedded independent photojournalist Zoriah's travails on his blog, it seems that he's just now been kicked out of Iraq, and risks being completely blacklisted as a war photographer, because of at least some higher-up Marine Corps officers' displeasure with images he posted. Images that centrally could help America to really get a better grip on the true cost of war for its participants. If you believe the experts -- and the poets --no one comes back from war unchanged. Whether it's what you've done/seen/participated in or not been able to do/see/participate in, it exacts a tremendous psychic cost. That doesn't mean we should stop fighting in wars -- just that we should be more aware of the actual costs to those who do. For every combatant killed, so many more are injured, and will come home with injuries that in many cases will profoundly transform their lives, and that of their families, for decades to come. It's a shame the Marine Corps doesn't seem to really want the rest of us wrap our brains around this concept more fully. It would help make us better empathizers with the true cost of war to its participants.
I had my own experience with Marine Corps censorship, earlier, on this site. In an attempt to humanize the story of an apparent PTSD sufferer who'd killed his girlfriend, I dug through the Marine Corps (public) archives on their website, and found a little backstory about the Marine, Eric Acevedo, who'd been accused of the crime. In and amongst the materials were some very key items: a photo that showed the human side of his grief and pain; and some material -- if you knew where to look -- that explained just what he'd been exposed to, in terms of combat trauma, while he was on the deployment that apparently harmed him the most. It was a tragic tale, but it was also public knowledge -- at least, information accessible by the public, that could be pieced together by someone like a journalist who knows how to dig and highlight the important parts of the story. I posted what I found, in an entry linked here -- and within three days, the Marine Corps had taken pains to scrub ALL identifying information about this poor guy, Acevedo, from their site. The photo was gone, the article about the memorial service he attended, for the multiple guys KIA from his battalion on the tour in question -- all gone. I learned about this new development when a reporter from the Dallas Morning News contacted me and said that all my links were down (I'd included them in the original piece, so anyone could follow and see what my sources had been). Together, we backtracked through the Marine Corps archives, and found NOTHING -- the site had been scrubbed clean of multiple mentions of the accused -- and has stayed that way ever since.
Nobody likes bad publicity, of course, including the Marine Corps -- but really, there's so much more at stake than that. When it comes to combat trauma and PTSD, the focus of this site -- it's important as a society that we see, learn, and otherwise come to understand what veterans go through -- or we won't have the compassion that we need to, and we won't pull for them to get the services they deserve, otherwise. We also need to see more clearly the link between instances of combat trauma, and ultimately developing PTSD. Not so that "no one else will join the military" -- not at all. So that those who do can get the help they need, and those in charge can allocate their resources accordingly.
It's my firm conviction that combat veterans don't "give" PTSD to themselves. They "get" it from what they've experienced. And this is a true cost of war, for the Marine Corps and others to "count" in advance, so that the right opportunities for treatment and ideally recovery can be provided. We can see from the late SSgt. Travis Twiggs' battle with PTSD -- or many others like him -- just how powerful, thorough, and deadly an opponent it really is. What we're not seeing, unfortunately, from the Marine Corps -- in these two instances -- is a reasonable, big picture view on how the horrors of war are not something the American public needs to shy away from, but embrace. And where the two may be linked up, as in the Eric Acevedo story, it's crucial that the Marine Corps not distance itself from its warriors, even when they're dented with significant wounds, visible and invisible. Sanitizing war? Why bother... Actually supporting the troops who go? Oh, definitely. If knowledge is power -- we need more, not less - in order to do so, more effectively.
In the Zoriah situation, it sounds like someone may have snapped under the strain and started a bad ball rolling with that -- created a polarized position that no one could retreat from, gracefully. If that's the case, that's a real shame. There's a much bigger picture here, and finding a workable compromise would be greatly important. I remember reading one Marine officer's published dispatches from Iraq, which got progressively darker and unpleasantly snappier as his tour went on, to the point that it sounded like another person writing them. I commented about this to someone who knew that Marine, who told me a little side story that explained a lot. Things had been going well until that Marine's superior, to whom he was very close, was seriously injured and almost died, taking part in a humanitarian mission with the Iraqi government. At that point, the junior officer hit a wall, got bitter, and got very angry with the Iraqis who could have done that, while the Americans were just trying to help. What I had been picking up in the Marine officer's writing reflected the personal struggles he was genuinely going through -- struggles which are highly understandable to anyone interested in human nature. My guess is here, someone who felt very stressed and angry because of Marines he cared about being injured and dying, snapped down on the whole situation instead of privately (or publicly) processing his natural grief -- and the ultimate impact might be, if this continues to go wrong, to keep the rest of us from being able to experience war a little bit more, even vicariously - in order that we better understand, and grieve, with those who suffer. I hope the Marine Corps finds a way to resolve this situation that respects the points of view of all sides involved, including the American public, which does have a need to know. The same goes for the Eric Acevedo situation, and scrubbing the information from their archives.
The American public pays the bill for these wars: we have a right to know what they're like for those fighting them. And those who fight them pay the ultimate price: and we respect their efforts and the character it takes to be warriors, very much.
---
I shared a very bleak,
grim quote with a Marine Corps Vietnam vet the other day, from an
Italian in the Middle Ages who said, "Life is a voyage on uncharted
waters, ending in shipwreck. There are no survivors." The former
Marine, still struggling all these years later with PTSD, said the
quote was almost right -- but would be better if we switched out "life"
with "combat" or, "war." Then, he said, it would be more accurate,
because, quoting him, there are no true "survivors, only shipwrecked
lives..."
Editor's Note: You can read about Zoriah's developing situation on his blog, linked here. You can also read previous entries on this blog where we've mentioned him, here and here. You can read about the Travis Twiggs story here, and in many other entries on this blog; and the Eric Acevedo story here; both as I've blogged about them.
And while you're at it, considering asking the Marine Corps to put the Eric Acevedo material (and anyone else's they've removed, in similar circumstances) back on their publicly-searchable archives, as it was before. I'm sure his defense lawyer would appreciate it, because any good defense of this client is going to need to advance theories that involve his extenuating circumstances (combat) and things that speak to his state of his mind (PTSD), both of which it's hard to picture were NOT service-related. Acevedo's crime? A truly terrible one. The combat trauma he experienced, and the PTSD he likely developed? Also terrible. Without war coverage like Zoriah's "tragic and amazing" photography, also a big picture we're likely to miss.
