Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith another face of PTSD

March 17, 2008
The War That Never Ends
Iraq Veterans Against the War’s ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings revealed the awful truths of the occupation and the ongoing struggle for those who have returned home.
By Jacob Wheeler

Last Memorial Day, Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith tried to kill himself. He had just been stop-lossed along with 80,000 other soldiers as part of the surge of U.S. forces to be sent to Iraq in the Bush administration’s last-ditch attempt at victory. Goldsmith already suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), though Veterans Affairs (VA) refused to diagnose him. His contract with the army was almost up, and he couldn’t bear the thought of an 18-month deployment.

Like the dozens of disgruntled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who testified at the Iraq Veterans Against the War’s (IVAW) emotional and groundbreaking “Winter Soldier” hearings, held from March 13-16 at the National Labor College near Washington D.C., Goldsmith had enlisted as a proud American eager to defend his country and trusting of the government that would send him into battle. Goldsmith hails from Long Island, and a day after watching smoke pour out of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, he had told friends that he “wanted to kill everyone in the Middle East.”

Goldsmith arrived in the sprawling ghetto of Baghdad’s Sadr City at age 19. He admits to following the command of his superiors and taking photos of unearthed dead bodies, more as war trophies than as evidence. “The images of dead bodies are burned into my memory,” Goldsmith said. His unit harassed the local population, and stopped cars, even as someone’s wife was going into labor in the back seat. And one day he trained his weapon on a six-year-old Iraqi boy pointing a stick at him as if it were an AK-47. “We were so desensitized. … The U.S. government put me in that position,” he said. “It took a lot of thinking not to kill the boy that day.”

Veterans like Kristofer Goldsmith discovered first-hand how the government sent them ill-prepared into a war under false pretenses, changed their rules of engagement with every deployment, brainwashed them into dehumanizing the Iraqi population, and brought them home without adequate means of caring for those for whom the war still rages on.
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