an army of one
People in my family don't talk about my Uncle Donnie. He was the youngest of all Grandpa's brothers. He served in Vietnam. Then he came back, possibly shot a bunch of people (the story is fuzzy here), and killed himself in his garage (the story is decidedly less fuzzy on this point). My dad was about six.
When I was younger, the only way my dad ( Read more... )
When I was younger, the only way my dad ( Read more... )
The military is so dysfunctional that it fucks with peoples heads before they even go into combat. Some of the most tragic stories I've heard occurred in between the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars. For example. I had this friend in college who had this high school friend visit once a month or so in the year or two following his stint with the Army Rangers in the late 1990s. He came to a lot of my parties and was very awkward and paranoid and my friend repeatedly had to explain to us that he had not been that way before the military. He was "going through a rough patch" and "just trying to find himself again." I talked to the guy a couple times and he explained that he was trained as a sniper and how he was so precisely trained to kill. He talked about it with regret but very offhandedly as if it were one of us student talking about a lame class we had gotten stuck with that semester. Eventually the guy stopped visiting and moved to Maine or something for no particular reason. Then, a few months later, we got word that he had traveled out to Washington (or was it Oregon?) and walked up to a cop sitting in a cruiser and just shot him right in the head. The guy claimed it was an "act of protest." He was on death row for a long time and, as far as I know, he has since been executed. And that's when my friend started explaining to us that he had actually wanted to stay in the military, but had become very depressed, wasn't given any support at all, and was basically pushed out of the service. Once he was on the outside he felt disgraced and didn't know what to do with his life. And in the end he just self-destructed.
I've heard similar stories from people who were stable soldiers, but eventually left the service b/c of witnessing stuff like this. This past Fall I was working with someone who had been in the Navy for a decade and she said that basic training strips away a lot of important components of a human being and makes them ultimately unstable. She worked around a lot of Marines and she said those guys were the worst and she had heard *dozens* of stories about those guys flipping out and becoming suicidal and/or homicidal. She's a pretty strong person (she's a court bailiff who serves warrants) and even though she's been out of the military for 17 years she still can't stand to be around active military personnel b/c they freak her out.
I believe this all comes down to conservatism, b/c conservative thinkers generally believe that mental health is a bunch of hogwash and that people who have psychological issues are basically lazy, weak or just plain bad. And this relates to the military b/c it is the most conservative-minded institution in our society. Except maybe our prison system. However, not only are our prisons organized like the military, but they don't give a shit about mental health either! Ever notice the alarming amount of mentally ill people (particularly schizophrenics) that there are in prison? Tons. Military and prison are both designed to break a persons will in order to make them conform to a specific standard, however, the breaking process completely ignores the fact that it's making many of its subjects far more unstable than they would have been as a regular civilian. And then they turn around and shit on them for being unstable as if it's their fault or their nature.
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Maybe politics does have something to do with it, but more than anything I think it's that as a culture we struggle between notions of personal responsibility and social responsibility. You know, I love the idea of personal responsibility. But I think if we don't take the trouble to find out what made someone how they are and why they did whatever the hell they did, we are disregarding their humanity that is unconscienable. To dismiss someone as "damaged" instead of "ill" or "struggling" is just a way to deny any responsibility we as a culture have towards the people that for whatever reason are struggling, whether it's some internally-spawned hurt like a mental illness or an external one like, say PTSD.
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