The New York Times has a good op-ed piece today by Bob Herbert, entitled "War's Psychic Toll," linked here.
One point he makes, in the wake of the shooting deaths at Camp Liberty, is that:
He also further clarifies a point that a number of people have been making over the last several years, which is that an all-volunteer military concentrates the inevitable "psychic toll" of warfare into too few combatants on our side. Herbert writes:
"Because we have chosen not to share the sacrifices of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrible burden of these conflicts is being shouldered by an obscenely small portion of the population. Since this warrior class is so small, the same troops have to be sent into the war zones for tour after harrowing tour.
We've already seen, in previous blog posts, how more combat => more opportunities for PTSD. The relationship is direct.
At some point, with the same people serving multiple deployments, being injured becomes a numbers game. And increasingly servicemembers who keep going back, if they've managed to avert injury so far, become concerned that their luck can't hold out forever.
A Recon Marine, with multiple deployments under his belt -- some would say, the toughest of the tough -- headed back to Afghanistan on Monday. "I'm scared," he told his friends and family, unashamedly. War is a dangerous game, and multiple deployments wreaks havoc on those who go, and those who stay behind and wait.
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In the old Bob Seger song about working on an assembly line, "Feel like just a number," he sang, "I feel like just another / Spoke in a great big wheel / Like a tiny blade of grass / In a great big field." Seger insists he's gonna "cruise out of this city / Head down to the sea / Gonna shout out at the ocean / Hey its me!" "I feel like a stranger / A stranger in this land," he sings. "I feel like a number / But I'm not a number / I'm not a number -- Dammit, I'm a man! / I said, I'm a man."
I recall a conversation with another Marine, who between tours of Vietnam, had a premonition that he wouldn't survive his second tour. What worried him even more than the dream was that everyone he knew who'd had a dream like that, and shared it with his buddies, subsequently was killed. This Marine talked it over with his dad, a heavily-decorated Army officer, who told him, in sort, to buck it up and suck it up and go back -- because if he didn't, he'd be running from every other experience like this in his life. Well, the premonition had a lot of weight to it -- he was shot multiple times and almost died, and took years to recover from his injuries. So we know that the Recon Marine in today's story, headed back to Afghanistan, does have something to be worried about -- even if he hasn't had a dream like this.
Ultimately, whether he and servicemembers like him think of themselves as "just a number" in the larger war machine or not, their more pressing concern, with multiple deployments in harm's way, is whether this time their number is going to be up. And let's hope it won't be. But of course, for society at large -- who stays behind -- the broader public health worry is that even if these warriors come home relatively "unscathed" -- in body, more likely than in mind -- their struggle with dealing with the after-effects of combat will just have begun.
Editor's note: To listen to the Bob Seger song mentioned above, on YouTube, click here.
