Timebomb
by digby
If you have some time to delve into something moving and important (that is depressingly getting absolutely no attention,) read this series on Salon by Mark Benjamin on the returning veterans. It's really stunning.
Preventable suicides. Avoidable drug overdoses. Murders that never should have happened. Four years after Salon exposed medical neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that ultimately grew into a national scandal, serious problems with the Army's healthcare system persist and the situation, at least at some Army posts, continues to deteriorate.
This story is no longer just about lack of medical care. It's far worse than sighting mold and mouse droppings in the barracks. Late last month the Army released data showing the highest suicide rate among soldiers in three decades. At least 128 soldiers committed suicide in 2008. Another 15 deaths are still under investigation as potential suicides. "Why do the numbers keep going up?" Army Secretary Pete Geren said at a Jan. 29 Pentagon news conference. "We can’t tell you." On Feb. 5, the Army announced it suspects 24 soldiers killed themselves last month, more than died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Read all the articles together if you can. And then pour yourself a stiff drink.
I was watching In The Valley Of Elah the other night on cable. It's quite a good movie, in my opinion, trying as it does to tackle some of the ways in which war attacks the characters and consciences of those involved. But it occurred to me as I was absorbing its implications at the end that as much as we can all agree that war is hell and that you can't really ever find a decent moral basis for such an organized lethal activity, there is something about a blatantly wrong war like Iraq that creates new depths of moral and psychological quicksand.
It's bad enough that humans still engage in this barbarism at all. But I'm not a pacifist and I believe in the concept of self-defense, so my admittedly sometimes dark reading of human nature tells me that it's still inevitable from time to time. Colonial wars and resource grabs are awful, always have been. There's no excuse for them. But I have to say that these modern "psychological" wars, where allegedly sophisticated global masterminds are using armies and weaponry to "send a message" may be the worst of all. Carefully calibrated assaults on populations for psychological purposes are so awful for everyone concerned that they may actually be making war worse rather than better.
And I think it's that kind of methodical, almost scientific approach (which doesn't work, by the way) that's what's making so many of our own troops lose it. After a while, some of them just can't rationalize "liberating" so many people from their lives --- for lies.
Take the time to read the series. It's very good and Salon should get some applause for doing that level of fine long form journalism in these ADD-riddled times. It's necessary.
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