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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Violent Veterans, the Big Picture or not?

I usually like reading the Huffington Post, but not this time. This article is missing a lot. While it's easy to blame the "military culture" as usual, this time, there is a lot more to it than that.

Sexual assaults against women is a huge problem, partly because there are more women in the military than before but also there is the issue of the military lowing the standards to maintain troop levels. Not an easy task with two active military campaigns, one being Afghanistan since 2001 followed up by Iraq in 2003. They allowed gang members into the military. They allowed people with criminal backgrounds in, gave options of jail or combat, allowed in all kinds of people they never would have allowed in before. The draft caught a lot up as well during Vietnam but even back then, there were standards. The draft allowed for a much larger pool of men to pull into the military, so there could be a little bit more picky.

That's one problem. The other is PTSD. We talk a lot about self-medicating with drugs and alcohol but we avoid talking about what a flashback does or the paranoia that also comes with PTSD. During a flashback, they are not "in their right senses" because while they may be physically at a location, their doing a time travel back to someplace else. Every part of them is back there, where it happened, with their lives on the line, the smell filling their nostrils, the taste in their mouth, their hearts pumping on overload, their muscles just as tense and they are watching for the enemy. No matter who comes up on them at the wrong moment, they are in that moment the enemy. This can also happen in the middle of the night with a violent nightmare and a wife makes the mistake of trying to wake up her screaming husband within arms reach. This usually leads to a bloody nose or black eye, occasionally something worse. Avoidable violence if they know what is happening during a nightmare or flashback and know how to handle it with the least repercussions.

Sexual assaults, part of this is because the brass has yet to come to terms with it, even after all these years and treat it like a crime. That's exactly what it is but much like the Catholic church simply transferred the offenders, the military still repeats the same mistakes and sends the wrong message that rape is not that big of a deal to end a military career. When these cases do end up going to trail, women across the nation let out a great big cheer that someone is finally doing something to take all of this seriously.

One more thing with this is the attitude that women do not belong in the military, should not be in combat environments and are more of a problem than a help or a sister. This attitude is fed by the fact they take women with little combat training, because they are not supposed to be in combat, then put them into combat areas, expect them to know what they're doing, and end up forcing the men in their company to play knight in shining armor.

It's not that the women could not hold their own given the right training, it's that the military does not train them to go into combat roles, but puts them in it just the same.

How do I know this? Because two of my videos focused on women at war. Women At War and The Voice, Women At War, were responded to by a lot of negative comments from soldiers and veterans about the women being more of a problem than a help. During a conference of female veterans in St. Louis, I spoke to several female veterans and was informed the complaints were legitimate enough. The military says that women do not go into combat zones but we've all seen the pictures. Considering that Iraq, aside from the Green Zone, was all combat zones, it's pretty hard to keep females out of combat areas when they had to go on re-supplying missions and work in one area from another. This kind of issue causes a lot of bad attitudes. Compiled on top of this is the fact the women are so afraid of being attacked by the men in their own units, even in the heat of Iraqi summers, they will reduce their fluid intake during the day to avoid having to use the facilities at night. They are that terrified. This ends up causing them health problems because they dehydrate their bodies.

All in all, if you want to know what stress on steroids is, talk to some of them and you'll discover there are a lot of reasons lives fall apart after combat. If you want to know what it was like when Vietnam veterans came home with no help for PTSD, until they fought for it, go to any prison in the country or jail and you'll find at least a few of them. They were sent to jails because they were self-medicating, because of domestic violence charges caused by flashbacks and nightmares along with a multitude of other problems no one seemed to care about back then. Veterans courts are finally starting to spread across the nation but back then it was just veterans in court.

So, yes, problems are real in the military and in military families, but to paint the problems as is found in this article is not really fair at all. You can look at something without really knowing what you're seeing and just assume you're right. As for the studies listed in the article, I can't remember them or how many people were asked to participate in the studies but it could be a very small group, if my guess is right. I do however urge you to read it because it's good to understand the magnitude of the problems we all should be dealing with instead of just ignoring them.

(One more thought is when you read about killing and hurting themselves more than any other time in history, understand that after Vietnam and the wars before, no one really took a serious look at what when with what.)

Helen Benedict: Violent Veterans, the Big Picture
By webmaster@huffingtonpost.com

Iraq War veterans seem to be killing and hurting themselves and others more than the veterans of any other war in American history.

Only two weeks ago, the New York Times reported nine murders and a rising number of rapes and other violent crimes against women committed by Iraq war veterans at Fort Carson, Colorado. One veteran beat his girlfriend to death. Another raped and murdered a mentally challenged teenage girl.

Some say this rise in veteran violence only reflects the better reporting of crimes and is not a rise at all, but the statistics are too startling for that to be true. Suicide rates are the highest they have ever been in the Army. The number of attempted suicides and self-inflicted injuries among soldiers has jumped six-fold since the Iraq war began and is continuing to rise. The rates of sexual violence against women inside the military are the highest ever seen. Domestic violence among veterans has reached historic frequency. And post-traumatic stress disorder rates appear to be higher among Iraq War veterans than among those who have served in Afghanistan or even, many believe, in Vietnam. One of the symptoms of P.T.S.D. is uncontrollable violence.

Psychologists usually blame the violence committed by Iraq War veterans on the stress of multiple deployments, the loss of close friends and comrades to bombs and bullets, and the military tendency to punish rather than treat G.I.s who break down at war.

These factors certainly all contribute, but the reasons for veteran violence and suicide lie much deeper than these. They begin in the family backgrounds of the troops, and are exacerbated by the nature of military training, the misogyny in military culture, the type of war we are waging in Iraq, and the remorse, fury and self-loathing that comes from fighting a war one doesn't believe in. None of these factors tend to be much discussed in the press, but they add up to a recipe for veteran violence:

Take the fact that half of all Army soldiers and Marine recruits report having been physically abused as children, while half of the women and about one-sixth of the men report say they were sexually abused, according to two significant veteran studies published in 1996 and 2005 respectively. A lot of people are joining the military to escape violent homes; some bring that violence with them. Most people inside the military know this. Most outsiders don't. click link for more

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