April 29, 2003
I’m so frustrated all the time I just want to choke somebody off.
That’s just one of the statements made by one American soldier back from Iraq in a counseling session with soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division. They confront their memories, fears and demons from the battlefield - and deal with them before they return home.
You can read reporter Mike Taibi’s piece and watch the video that was aired on MSNBC from here.
They’re called 'critical event stress debriefing sessions,' Taibi explains, and they’re now mandatory for U.S. soldiers heading home. The aim is to help those returning from combat know when and how to stop acting — and reacting — like soldiers. Last year, after Afghanistan, Americans were horrified when a number of returning soldiers brought the violence of the battlefield home with them. Four combat veterans at Fort Bragg alone killed their spouses, and two of them then turned their guns on themselves.
The debriefing sessions, which took place on Saddam Hussein’s palace grounds, are intended to head off the potentially explosive consequences of 'post-traumatic stress syndrome.'
Yes, the troops are coming home, but they’re not the same sons daughters and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives who left to fight Bush’s war for oil and power. They are damaged, and it’s not just the physical damage that they will have to find a way to live with for the rest of their lives. It’s not only the deaths of their comrades that many of them had to witness and then turn away from to keep the war going. It is the agonized screams and bloody bodies of Iraqi non-combatants that they to stand before, helpless in their knowledge that they are responsible for all of that needless pain and suffering.
When we send off our troops to kill and be killed, we are ensuring another generation riddled with men and women who are damaged and don’t know how to stop doing damage. Lets see how much money our government is willing to spend to support those troops now.
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Old Comments (3)
myrln on 29 Apr 2003
Unfortunately, the "gang that can't shoot straight" down in DC (assuming Dickiebird is still there somewhere; have we ever had so invisible a veep?), don't have anything to say about these unwounded wounded coming home. Otherwise they'd have to admit there's a fundamental hole in their grand strategy, namely: in war, we damage our own every bit as much as those we war with. Before war, nobody cares; after war, there's a bit of concern but very short-lived, and come the next war, nobody will remember what happened last time. Where are the WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS people now?
Kate S. on 30 Apr 2003
Sure hope their "debriefing" and "debridement" takes this time. Don't know what we can do about their lost souls of the killing fields, though. That will take a few decades to grow over.
David Gibbs on 03 Dec 2003
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters
--Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)