CNN, which in my opinion really doesn't win any awards for great reporting these days -- having inexplicably still never covered the Travis Twiggs PTSD murder suicide, for example -- has a decent story today about one family's struggle to cope with their young Army son's noncombat death. The article is linked here.
Noncombat deaths are on the rise, and they take place for a multitude of reasons. Some are suicide, some are murder, some are friendly fire, some are just plain accidents -- but all must be incredibly frustrating to the families and loved ones of those who suffer them. And increasingly they are a number that needs to be kept as a separate statistic about combat. There are killed in action, wounded in action, and now, noncombat deaths as well.
An additionally painful part, that the CNN article details well, by reporting on conversations with the family, is the difficulty families face when little or no information is forthcoming, which they desperately need a) to understand what happened to their loved one; b) so they can feel the loved one's death is not in vain; and c) so they can have closure, at some future point, about the death of their loved one. All three of those points become important.
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I was sitting in a newsroom recently when I got a chance to hear a local reporter talk to the family of a woman who'd recently died in Iraq, another noncombat death. She was just a few days from coming home for an extended visit, and her family was obviously distraught. The first day, they talked with the reporter, through their grief. The second day, as the reporter followed up more, trying to get more details and present a better story, the family came back and said that the military had contacted them and told them NOT to talk to reporters because...ta dum dum dum (fake drum roll here)... the military was "doing an investigation." As though that could possibly be compromised, at a distance! And then to further show the conflicting, misery-inducing feelings of the matter, the family turned around the next day and asked that reporter to write the woman combat soldier's obituary -- because she was in the best position to do that, having talked with the family at length, and additionally being (genuinely) trusted by them.
Ahhh...the conflicting motivations and interests at work here. Now the daughter is laid to "rest," and a month or so later...who's to say that the family has any more information, knowledge or understanding of what happened to their daughter...what really happened to their daughter...than they did then. And they lost a stellar opportunity to process their feelings in conversation with someone (the reporter) who could translate their grief to a wider community: others who are also grieving parents, or who have fought in wars, or who care about those who have.
It reminded me of the story we talked about on this blog a few months ago, first reported in the Washington Post, about Gina Gray, a whistleblower at Arlington National Cemetery who lost her job over her expressed concerns that the military brass was keeping reporters out of veterans' burial ceremonies, even over the objections of their families -- and instructing the families to forbid reporters from attending. Yikes. It really seems like the war machine is fully revved up and wanting to just hear one side of the story: its own, brooking no opposition, and no interference -- or even other points of view.
And we're not talking about PROTEST here -- we're talking about COVERAGE -- two very different things. Anyone can protest the war(s); reporters are supposed to take an evenhanded, impartial approach and just COVER it. So the rest of us can know what's going on.
The day the local servicemember died in Iraq of a noncombat injury, another American servicemember died elsewhere in Iraq, also of a noncombat injury. I'm not sure what the statistics are -- and I would bet they're somewhat subject to change -- but TWO noncombat deaths in one day, in different parts of Iraq, not good! I'm sure the families' grief is every bit as deep, sometimes maybe even more so, for noncombat deaths as for combat. And sometimes with even more of a feeling or a suspicion that their loved one "died in vain" -- something no one wants to go through.
Are there really any answers to this? Probably not. But as the dad in the CNN story says, based on a conversation he had with his own son shortly before he died, sometimes even the jumpiness, youth, and unpreparedness of one's fellow troops becomes a hazardous menace. His son, a married father of four, expressed his own concern that he felt at greater danger from his fellow soldier than from the insurgents. Argh.
And what of the vaunted military investigations into these senseless, needless death. Do we, the families, or the public, have full or even substantial confidence in them? My guess is they'd rank behind comparable civil investigations, with the added disincentive that the military has a pretty vested interest in NOT finding themselves to be at fault: or at least, a significant conflict of interest. (The Pat Tillman friendly fire death and subsequently "botched" investigation comes to mind as a fairly embarrassing example.) And if the military can't substantially prevent noncombat deaths from happening -- ones that don't involve vehicles, let's say -- why should they be able to investigate them somehow more successfully? The same thought process is at work in either situation: thinking through risks and managing them.
Of special interest to me, and maybe to others as well, is a particular type of noncombat death: the suicide of a senior officer whose pain becomes, at one point, for any number of reasons, too great to bear. Shockingly, there are a few of such deaths, acknowledged to be just that, in and among probably quite a few more that actually were that, but for one reason or another haven't come to light. These deaths hold in themselves real kernels of "things we should know" about combat, responsibility, and PTSD.
(If you've read the Travis Twiggs story, which we broke on this blog, you know how he struggled ceaselessly with the death of two of his men. He didn't seem to be able to get past that: it was a defining grief to him, and his hard feelings about it, realistic or not, poured out every time he mentioned it. He felt, likely wrongly but nonetheless tremendously deeply, entirely responsible for this event outside of his control, and nothing, seemingly, could move him from that interpretation. In the end, he ended his own life and that of his brother.)
There are several cases in point of senior officers taking their own lives, from all branches of the service, while deployed, or after they get back. Granted, not many, but these cases are still
instructive in terms of what we can learn about the price these people have paid that was perhaps higher than they could afford. There's a story I remember reading about around Memorial Day this year, where a senior officer in the National Guard went to a cemetery and shot himself to death,
unable to cope with the ravages of PTSD that followed him home. He was married, he was getting treatment, but whatever it was, wasn't enough, and he ended his life. I'm looking in vain right now for that reference; I'll add it back in when I find it again. In the meantime, two others, from further back. The sad stories of Marine Major Michael Stover, 43, who took his life during his second deployment in Iraq -- and the Army's Col. Ted Westhusing, 44, one of its foremost military ethics scholars, who also took his life in Iraq.
All three of those last cases mentioned, and Twiggs' as well, involve suicide: which technically is only one form or one portion of the total noncombat deaths. However, as we've seen elsewhere about suicide, it comes from an extremely whittled-down, stripped-down vision of how many choices there really are: basically one, and one only -- how to end it all, and stop the suffering.
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I've been interested for a while to learn whether the concept of "betrayal" on an abstract, philosophical level, is ever involved in suicides, and particularly ones of servicemembers, either during or after service, as veterans. It might be hard to explain quickly what I mean here. And more than anything it's just an idea I have, that I wish could be tested -- not a conclusion, in advance.
What I wonder about is this. If part of going to war is believing in the "rightness" of the cause, which is essentially a "black and white" concept -- us vs. them -- what happens if later something comes about to challenge or dilute that ideal? If the after-effect that we can see in someone's life is bitterness, we can sometimes back up -- rewind the tape -- and see what illusion they had earlier on that was somehow shattered or tainted. One of those instances of "every action having an equal and opposite reaction" things. (Think about adult survivors of pedophilia in the church, for instance, and how their shame is often compounded by anger at themselves for trusting religious figures, and at God and organized religion for providing the setting for violation.)
To talk about betrayal (of ideals?) in the context of the combat environment, we can think about it this way. Let's say you go to war believing you are fighting for God, motherhood and apple pie -- but then when you get there, you end up doing things you don't believe in, or actively oppose (from a moral, ethical or religious point of view); or, come to believe that you're being taken advantage or used as pawns in a bigger picture that has little to do with what you initially believed. Let's further suppose you are injured, or watch others suffer horrifically in such combat. As a thinking, feeling person -- how do you come to terms with that? It seems that you have very few choices.
If you want to get angry, and want to feel "had" by the powers that be, that creates bitterness, which works against healing; and it also implies that you were "dumb enough" (also known as innocent enough, or trusting enough) to be "had." That creates some self-hatred or self-loathing, as well as some hatred of whatever the established authority was that you followed when you signed up.
Why this interests me has really everything to do with the PTSD topic, which is the focus of this blog. With that as the setup, prologue or intro, what interests me is wondering -- do combatants suffer more PTSD in a war they come to look at as unjust -- either while they are there, or afterwards? Or does this have no effect at all on the rates of PTSD. World War II is often though of as the last obviously "just" war we fought -- and it does seem that rates of PTSD have been climbing since. But that's not conclusive by any means. Still, an interesting thought to ponder...
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And what's a just war, by the way? Well, probably one you wouldn't have any moral obstacles to fighting in, because you would so totally believe in the "rightness" of your side, as to not have any significant issues with why you were committing your resources to it. As a New Englander, it's easy to say that the Revolutionary War would have felt like a just war. Damn that King George! Toss that tea! Freedom for the colonists, and all that. In the Civil War? Probably both sides felt that it was a just war. World Wars I and II seemed to have that cachet. But starting with Vietnam, for one reason or another, all of a sudden the concept of the "just war" seems quite diluted. My personal feeling is that must have some effect on the combatants. It's always that much harder to justify any decision in your life, particularly one that causes suffering (really doesn't matter much to whom: could be yourself, could be others), if you are (or become) of two minds about participating. Morally, that type of ambiguity leaves you hamstrung where you'd like to be decisive, and always second-guessing your own involvement. It interests me a great deal to know whether and how much that affects psychological turmoil and recovery, such as we see with PTSD.
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In trying to find anyone enlightening to read on this topic, I was hoping Sissela Bok might have some answers. In the '80s, she wrote a seminal volume about ethics called "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life." I was hoping she'd speak directly to this topic, but as it turns out, she barely mentions anything like it, and this was the best I could come up with -- and it's really tangential, at best. It basically says, there are several professions, the military included, where lying is a good shortcut to accomplishment, which is pretty neutrally driven by the need to achieve and face crises resourcefully.
"There are a number of professions where crisis situations are not isolated incidents but frequent occurrences. Doctors, lawyers, journalists, secret-service agents, and military personnel, for example, may repeatedly find themselves in straits where serious consequences seem avoidable only through deception. Their chosen work exposes them frequently to such crises; their professions, moreover, reward competition and unusual achievement. Cutting corners may be one way to such achievements; and if deception is pervasive and rarely punished, then it will be all the more likely to spread. The accepted practices may then grow increasingly insensitive and abuses and mistakes more common, resulting in harm to self, profession, clients, and society." -- Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, by Sissela Bok.
The only other mention of military personnel in her book is a separate example about using untruthfulness judiciously in order to promote people such as career military officers whose professional livelihoods depend on regular advancement. She calls this a "deceptive practice where not much may seem to be at stake but which has high accumulated costs..." Much like colleges have been criticized for grade inflation (including Harvard University, where Bok's husband Derek was president for years); the military can be criticized for inflated job performance assessments, so that the career military person can keep being promoted. Hmmmn. "The entire practice," she says, "is unjust for those rated and bewildering for those who give and make use of ratings. It also robs recommendations of whatever benefits they are intended to bring."
Another neat, but highly tangential point. I guess for a deeper, fuller discussion of a sense of betrayal and its effects on the mind and psyche, we'll have to check out Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D's work in greater detail, or even Judith Herman, M.D.'s. In the meantime, the best we can offer is that betrayal families and loved ones must feel (that's an apolitical comment, just a philosophical one) about servicemembers dying an unjust, noncombat death -- either at their own hand, or at someone else's, on the same side - must truly just add to the difficulty of their grieving. The more unresolved the grief, the longer it lasts, and the deeper and more far-reaching its effects. Unresolved grief, as we've noted recently in the material from William Styron, linked here, is truly a risk factor of sorts for depression. And unresolved grief with anger intact...ahhh, that spells a future of bitterness, hatred, and inability to reconcile with the facts as they happened, which is truly painful for all concerned.
Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D., is a big believer that community keeps warriors sane; and other authors too who I've been reading recently on this topic (veterans and combat trauma; and/or suicide) make much of the point of affiliation -- the one with the others; the one in the midst of the others. My sense is that betrayal drives each person who feels it further within themselves, and apart from others -- whose camaraderie becomes essential to healing. If any of this fog ever lifts with any sort of clarity, I'll be sure to post about it. Until then, from deep within the fog... :-)
Postscript: Oddly enough, CNN (of all places!) has a separate, psychological-ish article on the topic of betrayal, from the other day, and in it they have this quote, which somewhat underscores what we were talking about earlier: betrayal is hard on the health, and it postpones or prolongs healing:
"According to a University of Zurich study published in May that examined how the
brain adapts to breaches of trust, people who have experienced betrayal
sometimes steer clear of future social interactions, and in extreme cases
develop social phobia."
In other words, someone who feels betrayed as part of a "system" (e.g., the military) is often less interested in being part of any other type of group thing, which might actually be able to help them heal, through the affiliative nature of groups. Ahh...more on that later...