For his whole life, my younger son has wanted to go into the military. Now that he is at the end of his junior year in high school, I find that I am paying more attention to military news, wondering what it is like for the mothers of the soldiers I read about and imagining how I would react if military personnel came to my front door. Even more than my concerns about him not coming home, I worry about what he will be when he comes home. How can a person survive a war mentally intact?
Nicholas D. Kristof writes an op-ed in The New York Times that I find very distressing. He writes about the high number of suicides among our veterans. He acknowledges that the VA is working hard "chipping away at a warrior culture" that devalues mental health care. He prepares to end his piece by saying,
We refurbish tanks after time in combat, but don't much help men and women exorcise the demons of war. Presidents commit troops to distant battlefields, but don't commit enough dollars to veterans' services afterward. We enlist soldiers to protect us, but when they come home we don't protect them.
When my son comes home...if he comes home...what damage will have been done to him? Soldiers can experience prolonged boredom and prolonged adrenaline rushes. They witness horrors that no one can fully prepare for. They risk--their health, their friends, their lives--constantly. Is it possible that anyone can return to civilian life unchanged?
I worry, too, about what must change within a person in order to kill other people. In the news today was a story about American soldiers who posed for photographs with dead Afghan insurgents. Yes, sitting in our cozy living rooms where we are not in imminent danger, it is horrifying. Is there no dignity? No respect? How can these soldiers do such a thing?
I don't see how it is possible to kill without de-humanizing the opponent. The act of pulling the trigger against another person surely requires soldiers to think of that person as other or less than themselves. Unless we are fully aware of what it is like to be in that situation, how can we begin to understand or to judge the actions of people who are there? I can't begin to speculate whether the dehumanizing is what allows soldiers to pull the trigger in the first place or it is what happens after the first kill. Maybe it's a little bit of both.
When I was young, I was at my friend's house for the afternoon. Her teenage sister was supposed to babysit, but she was on the phone with her friend for a long time (back in the day when phones had cords and people were tethered to the phone while talking). My friend whispered to me, "I have to show you something." We creeped upstairs, and she opened the hall closet. On the lowest shelf, behind the blankets and suitcases, there were two shoeboxes. She pulled them out and proceeded to lay photographs in front of me. Her dad had been in the Korean war, and these were his war pictures. There were lots of dead bodies, and lots of soldiers standing around smiling about their conquests. Two pictures stood out the most to me, and the images are seared into my brain forever. One was her dad standing, cigarette dangling out of his smiling mouth, holding up two heads of dead Koreans. The other was him standing on top of a heap of heads--and by "heap," I mean a pile that was as tall as her dad.
They were horrifying pictures. They shaped my views of war and soldiers in ways I've only recently begun to recognize. But when I listened to this story on the radio and later when I read the article, these pictures were what came to mind. The greater the horror of war, the greater the need to de-humanize the enemy so you can do the horrible things you need to do.
Even when soldiers don't give up their lives, they surely are affected for the rest of their lives. Two photographs that I saw forty years ago are burned into my mind and heart. How much worse is it for those who see, smell, and hear the real thing? When we send soldiers into war, do we really know what we are asking of them? And aren't we perhaps too quick to condemn actions that we don't understand?
It isn't that I think what these soldiers did was right; I just think it is understandable from a certain point of view.
How devastating war is, in so many ways. The photographs and suicides are just symptoms of being a soldier. If we are going to ask them to do what they do, then we need to acknowledge that they have to transform themselves from the people they were into soldiers--and we must have more compassion for the entirety of the results of that transformation. We owe them at least that much.
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