Peridyd's Progress

This, a very chilling article from the Washington Post. Andrew Tilghman writes bravely and honestly about an incident back in February in which he met Private Steven D. Green, a young solider who one month after he interviewed him would allegedly rape and murder a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and her family.

The article is moving for several reasons.

First there's Pvt. Green's sense of pointlessness. He's seen through the façade of the war, and his response to the futility is to dehumanize his enemy—not the politicos—but the other victims of the politicians' actions, the Iraqi people:

"We're pawns for the [expletive] politicians, for people that don't give a [expletive] about us and don't know anything about what it's like to be out here on the line."

Second, there's reporter Tilghman's unstated but subtly acknowledged responsibility for the subsequent actions of Private Green. I know it's terrible to have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and lay blame on anyone. And I don't intend to do that. However, Mr. Tilghman is, I believe, bringing up questions regarding reportorial responsibility. Is this a case in which it would be right to lose objectivity and go up the chain of command to relay what he's heard to Pvt. Green's superiors? It likely wouldn't have done any good. It seems as if Pvt. Green is only looking for a way to cope with the unthinkable. Tilghman writes,

In the end, I never included Green's comments in any of the handful of stories I wrote from Mahmudiyah for Stars and Stripes. When he said he was inured to death and killing, it seemed to me -- in that place and at that time -- a reasonable thing to say. While in Iraq, I also saw people bleed and die. And there was something unspeakably underwhelming about it. It's not a Hollywood action movie -- there are no rapid edits, no adrenaline-pumping soundtracks, no logical narratives that help make sense of it. Bits of lead fly through the air, put holes in people and their bodily fluids leak out and they die. Those who knew them mourn and move on.

But no level of combat stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts Green allegedly committed. I suppose I will always look back on our conversations in Mahmudiyah and wonder: Just what did he mean?

Thirdly, given the story that the soldier relates regarding the death of Sgt. Casica, one must ask if Green was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome while he was out in the field. I am, of course, not a psychologist, and even if I were I don't think it would be possible to Bill Frist this and make a diagnosis based upon a newspaper article. Yet, it's disturbing to consider the terrifying possibility that we have soldiers in the field who are no longer psychologically stable and are, therefore, unfit for duty. It's more chilling when you consider that it's probably their duty that's made them unfit in the first place.

Finally, the pacifist and Buddhist in me feel compelled to pose an issue. This and the previous Vietnam generation are the first in which we've truly attended to the psychological consequences of war. As we see, with increasing frequency, soldiers returning from the battlefield with severe enough psychological scars that they're unable to live a normal life without intense therapeutic intervention, is it possible that we will discover that war is not only insane but that it is an insanity-making enterprise? If we learn that, will it be possible to argue (with any integrity) that war is a normal component of the human condition? Is it normal for one's “natural” activities to drive oneself insane?

No one, I would argue, not even the perpetrators of violence, is immune to its effects. Violence takes its toll on everyone. Even those of us who sit in our comfortable middle class homes, thousands of miles from the battlefields. Resist violence. Resist the insane actions of our government.

Shanti.