Soldiers committing suicide in Iraq

1. The Happy Warrior – by Richard Schoch/Philosopher’s Magazine

More than fifty American soldiers have killed themselves in Iraq, and nearly all the suicides have occurred after George W Bush declared “mission accomplished” from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. (This is not a uniquely American phenomenon: the death of the first female British soldier in Basra was ruled a suicide.) Compared to the total number of deaths on either side, fifty is a small number. Statistically, though, it is alarmingly high. At the height of the soldier suicides, US forces in Iraq were killing themselves at a rate 70% higher than the general population: 17.3 suicides per 100,000 soldiers, 10.1 suicides per 100,000 civilians. Death by self-inflicted wound (almost always a bullet to the head) accounted for about seven percent of all US military fatalities in Iraq in 2003. Nor do the suicides end when the troops come home. At least seven soldiers have killed themselves after returning to the United States, including two hospitalised veterans who hanged themselves at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center outside Washington, DC. At Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, two soldiers committed murder-suicides last year by shooting their wives before turning their guns upon themselves.

Officially, there's no problem. Such is the predictable and reassuring conclusion – reassuring, that is, for Donald Rumsfeld – of the Defense Department's first-ever mental health survey conducted in a combat zone. After interviewing more than 700 soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon's psychiatric swat team recommended, in a report whose publication was delayed for three months by bureaucratic in-fighting, that one way to stop soldiers killing themselves was to increase the stockpile of anti-depressants and sleeping pills. The military- pharmaceutical complex has arrived.

But other Army psychiatrists – no pushovers, their job is to get anxious soldiers back to the frontlines – have admitted that there is a problem: the suicide rate in Iraq is higher than that in either the Second World War, Korea, or even Vietnam. In those wars the suicide rate fell over time because, presumably, a soldier's survival instinct took over once the initial shock of being thrown into battle wore off. In Iraq, what's happened is just the opposite: the suicide rate increased after the formal cessation of hostilities in 2003. Undeniably, more and more soldiers are struggling to cope, and suicide is only the most extreme response to the stress and trauma that they face. Nearly 1,000 American soldiers have been evacuated from Iraq for mental health reasons. And since the US army is now all-volunteer – in those earlier wars, troops were drafted – each recruit undergoes psychological screening. Those judged likely to experience mental trauma from combat duty – and to harm themselves as a consequence – are weeded out. Thus, the GIs who committed suicide were, according to the Army's own experts, psychologically “fit”.

Regardless of how one feels about the war, that soldiers in Iraq are killing themselves is a tragedy among tragedies. Why has it happened? Some inkling may be found in poetry. In December 1805 (or maybe a month later), shortly after learning of the death of Admiral Nelson in the Battle of Trafalgar, Wordsworth wrote “The Character of the Happy Warrior”. Drawn by the news of Nelson's heroic demise to contemplate individual excellence in military conduct, Wordsworth began his poem with a question that, two centuries later, seems oddly – wrongly – phrased: “Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he/That every man in arms should wish to be?”

From our more ambivalent vantage point we might well wonder how any warrior could be called happy in a way that does not invite mockery or cause alarm. Our soldiers are courageous and valiant, yes, but not happy . That would be almost maniacal, as if they relished the blood and guts of combat. More in tune with our subdued sensibility is Wilfred Owen's “Insensibility”, a First World War poem declaring that the only way soldiers can be happy is to anesthetise themselves to the horror of battle. “Happy are these who lose imagination:/They have enough to carry with ammunition.” The warrior, happy in his mindlessness, becomes more like an unthinking beast of burden. In adverse circumstances, happiness can be no more than relief and respite from the pain of actuality (a view certainly shared by pharmaceutical companies today).

The difference in these poems lies not, or at least not just, in the recognition that Wordsworth is pro-war and Owen is anti-war. In fact, Wordsworth was troubled whenever readers or critics declared “The Character of the Happy Warrior” to be his finest poem because he knew that they were just seduced by its high moral sentiment. The more profound difference is that Wordsworth relied on a conception of happiness, classical in origin, which would have struck Owen, and does strike us today, as counter-intuitive, perhaps even misguided.

The warrior, says Wordsworth, is “happy as a Lover” because he faces death. It would be lunatic to suggest that the warrior prefers death or rejoices at its prospect. (That is precisely the difference between warriors and martyrs.) Indeed, the better and more virtuous his life the more loath he will be to lose it. Aristotle, whose shade must have stood at Wordsworth's shoulder, believed that death is a greater loss for a happy man than for a miserable one because the happy man has more to lose. And yet the warrior is willing to lose his life should that sacrifice be needed for the noble end that he seeks.

But in what sense can this constitute his happiness ? By acting in accordance with his own purpose in life, his own “excellence” (to use Aristotle's word), the warrior makes himself happy. It is virtuous to sacrifice yourself for a noble cause, and virtue put into action, as Aristotle maintains in his Nicomachean Ethics , is the substance of happiness. Nowhere is the risk of suffering greater – and hence, the occasion for virtue more conspicuous – than on the battlefield, where the warrior fearlessly faces a noble death. What makes the warrior's life happy is not its pleasantness (what is pleasant about killing?) but its fullness and its virtue, even though suffering and loss may lie in wait. Hence, Wordsworth's belief that the warrior, “doomed to go in company with Pain,/And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!/Turns his necessity to glorious gain.”

Of course it is one thing to write about a war and another to fight it. Nor shall we ever know exactly why soldiers in Iraq have killed themselves. Fear, loneliness, separation from loved ones, stress, despair – the possible reasons are complex. Still, there is singularity in the complexity. Happy people do not take their own lives. Whatever the soldiers who killed themselves were feeling, they were feeling unhappy. I mean that as neither a negative verdict upon the soldiers nor an attribution of some moral failure, as if it were their duty to be happy even in such intolerable circumstances. It is not for me, who has not stood in their place, to judge them. Rather, my intent is to understand the values, concerns and beliefs that might explain their actions.

When I speak of the soldiers' unhappiness, I do not mean it in an obvious or trivial sense – war is hell, of course soldiers are going to be unhappy – but in the profound moral sense that Wordsworth had in mind: happiness requires, even at the risk of suffering and pain, the exercise of virtue for a noble purpose. And it is not virtue that has gone missing. The GIs who commit suicide are not cowards who fear death. Tragically, death is what they seek. What they fear is life; or, rather, what life has become. To a considerable extent, the suicides must reflect the frustration and anxiety felt by many, though certainly not all, American troops. It does indeed seem to be the case that soldiers who kill themselves in the aftermath of battle – nearly every suicide has occurred in the fraught “nation-building” phase of the conflict – harbour doubts not about their own worthiness but about the worthiness of their mission.

Last summer, Col Ted Westhusing, a West Point professor of military ethics serving in Iraq, left the following note before putting his 9-mm service pistol to his head: “I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse, and liars. I am sullied. I came to serve honourably and feel dishonoured. Death before being dishonoured any more.” ( See news, TPM 34 ) The colonel's thoughts were echoed in public by a veteran who, when speaking at a memorial service for a childhood friend who had killed himself after returning from Iraq, blamed his friend's death on the fact that too many American soldiers “are having trouble finding the justice” in the war. No warrior who believes that his mission lacks honour or justice – and hence nobility, which is the pursuit of them – can be happy in the way that Wordsworth described. Unhappiness will be his lot.

Yet this lamentable state – the impossibility of happiness when happiness is most needed – is not unique to the soldiers who took their own lives. It is not confined to troops caught in a war whose justice they cannot fathom, whose honour they cannot find. Rather, their actions are the grim outcome of a malady that afflicts all of modern society. This deep-set disorder, too often unrecognised, is that we have lost contact with the old and rich tradition of happiness that enabled Wordsworth to imagine – to know – that Nelson, carried below deck on HMS Victory after being fatally wounded by a French sniper, died a happy man. We have lost the ability to understand the fundamentally moral dimension of the good life. Which explains why the Pentagon treated the suicides as a medical problem to be solved by prescribing anti-depressants rather than an ethical problem – as Col Westhusing saw it – to be solved by realigning values.

The tragedy of soldier suicides in Iraq raises many moral questions for nations, for their warriors, and for their citizens, too. But none is more urgent and more accordant with the times than why we have denied ourselves the chance of finding a happiness that is meaningful. Sometime between the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle for Baghdad we lost the belief that happiness, in order to be happiness, must turn miserable necessity into glorious gain. Deaf to the conversation of the ages, we've settled, nowadays, for a weaker, more selfish, happiness: mere enjoyment of pleasure, mere avoidance of pain and suffering. Too often, we prize, like Owen, the dullness that best solves our doubt.

The happiness that we've lost is one that John Stuart Mill would have recognised, and not just because Wordsworth was his favourite poet, whose lyrics helped him recover from the “crisis in his mental history”. Rejecting the excesses of strict utilitarian reasoning, Mill discovered the paradox of happiness: that we find it not by satisfying ourselves but through devotion to “the happiness of others”, “the improvement of mankind”, or even “some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end”. Suspicious, though he was, of glorified military heroes – he particularly had it in for Wellington – he would nonetheless have understood why Wordsworth could write in praise of the “happy warrior”. For in the valour of military service, and in a soldier's willingness to sacrifice himself for the common good, Mill would have recognised the very “sense of honour” that he insisted was the basis of any person's happiness. And he would understand, today, the unbearable strain of honour that cannot express itself, nobility that cannot apply itself, and the tragic consequence of being trapped in circumstances when the possibility of happiness is no longer possible.

(Richard Schoch is professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London and author of The Secrets of happiness: three thousand years of searching for the good life)


2. The Ills of War
Shafting the Vets
By CONN HALLINAN/Counterpunch

"W ar is hell," Union General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said 14 years after the end of the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. "It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation."

Clearly the U.S. Civil War is not on the reading list of psychiatrist Sally Satel, a scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Indeed, Satel sees war less as hell than as a golden opportunity for veteran lay-abouts to milk the government by " overpathologizing the psychic pain of war."

Satel, whom the AEI trots out anytime the Bush administration needs cover for cutting veteran services and benefits, says the problem for former soldiers is not Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). "The real trouble for vets," she writes, is that "once a patient receives a monthly check based on his psychiatric diagnosis, his motivation to hold a job wanes." Her solution? "Don't offer disability benefits too quickly."

The commentary makes an interesting contrast to a powerful piece in the October 2006 issue of the California Nurses Association's magazine Registered Nurse titled "The Battle at Home" by Caitlin Fischer and Diana Reiss. They found that "in veterans' hospitals across the country-and in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded psych and primary care clinics as well-Registered Nurses are treating soldiers and picking up the pieces of a tattered army."

According to the authors, RNs across the country "have witnessed the guilt, rage, emotional numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq and Afghanistan," as well as older vets from previous wars, "whose half-century-old trauma have been 'triggered' by the images of Iraq."

How many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually fall victim to PTSD is not clear, although a U.S. Defense Department study in 2006 found that one in six returnees suffer from depression or stress disorders, and 35% have sought counseling for emotional difficulties. The Veterans Administration (VA) treated 20,638 Iraq vets for PTSD in just the first quarter of 2006 and is currently processing a backlog of 400,000 cases.

Out of 700,000 soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf War, 118,000 are suffering from chronic fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, joint pains, anxiety, memory loss, and balance problems, and 40% receive disability pay. Gulf vets are also twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and between two and three times more likely to have children with birth defects.


The Ills of War

Modern battlefields are toxic nightmares, filled with depleted uranium ammunition, exotic explosives, and deadly cluster bomblets. The soldiers are shot up with experimental vaccines that can have dangerous side effects from additives like squalene. In short, soldiers are not only under fire, they are assaulted by their own weapons systems and medical procedures.

Satel need have no worries about the VA rushing to hand out cash to veteran couch potatoes. According to Fischer and Reiss, "A returning vet must wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits. An appeal can take up to three years."

Reserve and National Guard troops-who make up between 40 and 50% of the frontline troops in Iraq and Afghanistan-have a particular problem, because their military medical insurance benefits only cover conditions diagnosed in the first 100 days. PTSD sometimes takes years, even decades to kick in.

When they do complain, vets can expect that their ailments will be dismissed or their cause stonewalled.

When Gulf War vets complained about the symptoms which have come to be called "Gulf War Syndrome," the Pentagon told them it was in their heads, in spite of studies by the British Medical Journal and the U.S. Center for Disease Control that showed the returnees were suffering illnesses at 12 times the rate of non-Gulf vets.

For five years after the Gulf War the Pentagon denied that any troops had been exposed to chemical weapons. It took pressure from veterans' organizations and Sen. Donald Riegle (D-MI) to get the Pentagon to admit finally that as many as 130,000 troops (the vets say the number is higher) were exposed to chemical weapons from the destruction of the Iraqi arms depot at Khamisiyah.

Veteran organizations are currently fighting the Pentagon over its refusal to screen returning soldiers for mild brain injuries. Figures indicate that up to 10% of the troops suffer from concussions during their tours, a figure that rises to 20% for those in the front lines. Research shows that concussions can cause memory loss, headaches, sleep disturbances, and behavior problems. The Pentagon, arguing that the long-term effect of brain injuries needs more research, is unwilling to fund a screening program.

Given the wide use of roadside bombs, "Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of the war on terrorism," George Zitnay, co-founder of the Brain Injury Center, told USA Today . And according to researchers at Harvard and Colombia, the cost of treating those brain injuries will be $14 billion over the next 20 years.


In Iraq

Upwards of 20,000 Americans have been wounded in Iraq, some of those so grotesquely that medicine has invented a new term to describe them-polytrauma. An estimated 7,000 vets have severe brain and spinal injuries, and have required amputations. For the blind, brain damaged, and paralyzed, war is indeed hell.

Calculating the cost of war is tricky, but Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently calculated that the price tag for the long-term health care for Iraq War vets will exceed $2 trillion.

But the hell we bring home is only a pale reflection of the hell we leave behind.

According to a recent estimate by the British medical journal, The Lancet , upwards of 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. Most of the country's infrastructure-already damaged in the first Gulf War or degraded by a decade of sanctions-has essentially collapsed.

Iraq's experience is not unique.

The Vietnam War ended more than 30 years ago, but according to the recent book, Vietnam: A Natural History , Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians are still dying from it.

From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped over 14 million tons of bombs on those three countries, including 90 million cluster munitions on tiny Laos alone. Somewhere between 30 to 40% of those fiendish devices never exploded, and, according to the British Mines Advisory Group, they have killed or maimed 12,000 Laotians since the end of the war. They continue to extract a yearly toll of 100 to 200 people, many of them children.

Traces of the 20 million gallons of Agent White, Agent Blue, and Agent Orange herbicides that the United States sprayed over Vietnam still poison the water, soil, vegetation, animals, and people of Southeast Asia, producing cancer and birth defect rates among the highest in the world.

So war is indeed hell-for those who fight it, those caught in the middle of it, and those who eventually pick up the pieces.

(Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus and a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.)