Yves here. This post describes studies suggest that traumatic brain injuries play a significant role in the high suicide rates among active duty and recently decommissioned US service members. Although the findings are significant for US soldiers, this strong correlation has implications for many other exposed populations, such as soldiers in Ukraine (increasingly thrown into battle with inadequate training and materiel in an artillery-heavy conflict), civilians in Gaza, who are already suffering unimaginable psychological distress even before getting to a possible added physical component, and even workers who might be exposed to explosive forces and not have adequate protective gear.
One of my former trainers (whose clientele consisted significantly of professional athletes) looked early into brain injuries when the medical injury and press were waking up to the fact that three serious concussions (the kind that knock you out) or a higher number of less severe concussions resulted in cognitive impairment in later life. The football industry quickly worked out that these findings amount to large liability futures, as well as having good odds of reducing the popularity of the game. At least as of then, and I have not seen any studies or breakthroughs that change the story, there are no treatments for these injuries. So he developed training to help athletes decelerate and fall better and reduce the odds of brain trauma, particularly when sent back to compete while not fully recovered from other injuries (the athlete will try to protect the fragile body part, which often increases the odds of knocking their head).
This sort of protection may seem mundane and too unsexy to bother with, but the example of soldiers suggests it really might save lives. And in general, there’s a fixation in Western medicine with magic whiz-bang treatment rather than prevention.
By Nick Turse. Originally published at TomDispatch
At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He reportedly wanted to “bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil,” provoking savage asymmetric conflicts that would send home a stream of “wooden boxes and coffins” and weaken American resolve. “This is when you will leave,” he predicted.
After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.
As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35% — 883 troops — took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.
Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.
Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000 — 57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans — an estimated 30,177 of them — had killed themselves.
“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”
Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides
In June, a New York Times front-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them — a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.
The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
None of it should, however, have been surprising.
After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.
That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”
Quite obviously, it never happened.
The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.
Studies on the Shelf
Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.
While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.
The New York Times recently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.
The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.
Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”
Bin Laden’s Triumph
On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001 — a global conflict that still grinds on today — ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.
The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.
During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.
Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.
“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans — four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths — has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.
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Remember the character of Uncle Sam as Osama pointing at you and saying, “We want you to invade Iraq” ?
Wars always come home. Read the article on the suicides a while ago, just horrible.
Murdering innocent people, eventually gets to you.
Our so called leaders just don’t care. They will send $200+ billion to be wasted in Ukraine, but how about increasing the staff at the VA, nope.
And I’m supposed for who why?
How about our leaders thinking long and hard and trying détente before they send these soldiers into harm’s way in the first place?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html
June 30, 2024
Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide
A military lab found distinctive damage from repeated blast exposure in every brain it tested, but Navy SEAL leaders were kept in the dark about the pattern.
By Dave Philipps
Photographs by Kenny Holston
David Metcalf’s last act in life was an attempt to send a message — that years as a Navy SEAL had left his brain so damaged that he could barely recognize himself.
He died by suicide in his garage in North Carolina in 2019, after nearly 20 years in the Navy. But just before he died, he arranged a stack of books about brain injury by his side, and taped a note to the door that read, in part, “Gaps in memory, failing recognition, mood swings, headaches, impulsiveness, fatigue, anxiety, and paranoia were not who I was, but have become who I am. Each is worsening.”
Then he shot himself in the heart, preserving his brain to be analyzed by a state-of-the-art Defense Department laboratory in Maryland.
The lab found an unusual pattern of damage seen only in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves.
The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function…
From this information:
The lab found an unusual pattern of damage seen only in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves.
The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action.
I logically conclude that the rate of suicides should be exceptionally high amongst artillerymen compared to members of other branches. The blast waves are much more powerful with the kind of weapons they are using, and as a consequence, brain damage should be more widespread and severe amongst gunners.
Does anybody know whether it is true? Why do the studies focus on the small “elite” SEALS or SOF?
I’d always wondered if Israel’s jump to bullpup rifles (chamber, by your head) caused Chronic traumatic encephalopathy to further damage sociopathic & sneeringly sociopathic brains? We’d seen CTE in Pittsburgh, long before Bennet Omalu. We just called it, “yunz jus’ be’n uh Jagoff, ‘nat!”
This Navy Seal describes the kind of breaching charge that messed up his brain pretty bad and is pretty typical for SEALs. Described at the 4:18 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NxcMRd-XHY
One silver lining in all this is that psychedelic assisted therapy suddenly has a lot of supporters in congress. As my psychedelic-assisted therapist said (her voice dripping with bitterness): “What are they going to do? Say ‘f*ck the veterans?”
Not that I’m aware of.
Personally, i found the blasts from firing howitzers and mortars were insignificant (although unbelievably loud without earplugs) when in the safety zone behind the weapon. I made the mistake of being forward of that once and ensured that nobody was ever there again under my time as battery XO and FDO.
As a FiST leader, I would call fire as close to myself as possible just to experience it, and even at 100 meters an 81mm mortar burst was more intense than firing a 155mm at charge 7 white, with a shock going through you vs surrounding you. That is probably the difference in velocity between a low explosive propellant charge of nitrocellulose vs a high explosive bursting charge of TNT or whatever was in the business end of the round.
I never had to serve in a combat zone so I can’t compare my experience to what those people have gone through. Hand grenades weren’t that bad, so that’s as close as I can get to that.
I’ve had 3 concussions: 2 from car crashes and one from a collision in D3 college soccer. Those things really mess you up, and for a long time.
NEWS YOU CAN USE!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/us/navy-seal-training-death.html
August 30, 2022
Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs
The elite force’s selection course is so punishing that few make it through, and many of those who do resort to illicit tactics.
By Dave Philipps
CORONADO, Calif. — Kyle Mullen always had the natural drive and talent that made success look easy. Until he tried out for the Navy SEALs.
The 24-year-old arrived on the California coast in January for the SEALs’ punishing selection course in the best shape of his life — even better than when he was a state champion defensive end in high school or the captain of the football team at Yale.
But by the middle of the course’s third week — a continual gut punch of physical and mental hardship, sleep deprivation and hypothermia that the SEALs call Hell Week — the 6-foot-4-inch athlete from Manalapan, N.J., was dead-eyed with exhaustion, riddled with infection and coughing up blood from lungs that were so full of fluid that others who were there said later that he sounded like he was gargling.
The course began with 210 men. By the middle of Hell Week, 189 had quit or been brought down by injury. But Seaman Mullen kept on slogging for days, spitting blood all the while. The instructors and medics conducting the course, perhaps out of admiration for his grit, did not stop him…
Spc Hodges was a class ahead me in AIT at Ft Gordon studying to be an ATC Equipment Repairer 94D. We were all shocked when we heard about his murder suicide of a cop and himself:
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/man-assault-rifle-kills-augusta-deputy/241663000/?outputType=amp
RIP Hodges
There was an interesting show called “Homecoming” with Julia Roberts which posed a scenario about how the government might try to deal with PTSD — a “magic whiz-bang treatment” as Yves suggests.
Back in the late ’80’s, I saw a newspaper article where the VA had numbers at that time that over 153,000 Vietnam era veterans had committed suicide. That over 2.6 times the names on the wall, and should be acknowledged.
“The Times found that “mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.”
That sentence says it all.
So this makes me wonder. The implication here is that the traumatic brain injuries are the cause of these suicides. Maybe. As we all know, correlation is not causation. Are NFL players with TBI (or other populations) committing suicide at the same rates? Seems we would have heard about it if so. I propose another cause. Blast induced TBI is most definitely going to be a marker for close combat experience. Unless we are seeing a correlation in higher suicides with non military TBI patients as well, I would hypothesize that the suicides may be driven by the psychological trauma of un-aliving other humans at close range, or being under attack and watching comrades lose their lives, rather than the actual brain trauma being the proximate driver of these suicides. You all know how it is in this society- physical medical issues are socially acceptable, but we prefer to sweep psychological issues under the rug, and ignore them. Seems to me that might possibly be going on here.
Hockey and (American) football players indeed are suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. One of the symptoms is “even suicidal thinking”. But that’s way down the list after memory problems, confusion, changed personality, aggression and depression.
I have two doctors right here in Burlington, Ontario — one for an endocrine issue, the other for arthroscopic issues — who are engaged in research on the damage concussions wreak upon young athletes. The former because of his work with lacrosse players, the latter more generally across contact sports.
Given their concerns about the dangers of contact sports, I can only imagine the carnage of concussive effects during modern warfare.
There is research conducted in DC medical facilities I believe, of brains of deceased veterans with PTSD which revealed grey matter going brown.
There were defined physical transformations of brain matter which also led to dysregulation of Autonomous Nervous System and Cardiac health.
Now I look there are lots of papers published on this at NIH and some by Zhang et al.
It is also requiring of neural pathways with shrinkage in some areas of brain and bulking up in others. PTSD is physical as opposed to psychiatric
I think you’re probably right, Comrade.
The explosion PLUS the feeling that you’re the bad guy after all.
Only a tough mind can overcome that madness.
We are increasingly seeing the same issue among professional rugby players who take a lot of hits. The first case was confirmed in March of this year, but since it can only be confirmed postmortem by a brain examination (and we haven’t even been looking until recently) it’s likely to be far more pervasive. There is an action by players against sport administration, who claim they have not done enough to inform or protect them.
There were fewer reports for other full contact codes, but in many cases I suspect that’s simply because people aren’t asking the question yet. I found one study claiming that elite Aussie Rules players have a lower death rate than the general population so there’s perhaps less evidence there (but the data gathering methodology was based on Wikipedia and public sources, and did not look at medical records).
None of this means that your explanation couldn’t be a contributing factor as well.
I haven’t heard that much about hockey, but the traumatic brain injury in football and its long term impacts have been a huge topic for conversation for some time now. IDK how high suicide rates are among former footballers, though.
I’m an Iraq war vet who has occasionally (less frequently as time goes by) suffered through depression and suicidal ideation. I’ve also been part of the anti-war veteran community for about a decade. In that community, suicide and depression is a fact of our existence.
I think this article wisely points out that there are no singular causes of the massive over-representation of suicide among war fighters and veterans. And I further think that the field in which the individual was in plays many roles in the reasons for suicidal ideation. While I would not refute the myriad of explanations of elevated suicide rates in the article above, I want to address one which was left out, because it is always left out – particularly by officers, politicians and, by extension, the VA – that of what we call “moral injury.” I certainly don’t make any assumptions as to the prevalence of “moral injury” as a factor of suicide vis a vis other reasons. But, I do claim, however anecdotally, this is the factor most discussed among anti-war vets, precisely because of the particularities by which we associate as well as the lack of public discourse surrounding the “moral injury” phenomenon.
For a few examples, I was an interrogator, who has had to come to terms with my role in torture of Iraqis – though what I engaged in would not be considered torture at all by most, it has become undeniable to me. Drone operators, likewise, have often struggled with mental anguish stemming from the mind-f*** of remotely dropping bombs on little dots identified by someone, somewhere as “terrorists.” And I’ve spoken with infantry war fighters who have put bullets into too many human beings invariably dressed identically to common civilians.
In each case above, we all carried out our orders/duties in the normal course of our jobs in a defined battle space… So, why the mental anguish?
I believe it comes from two things primarily – dehumanization and alienation (more the Durkheim sense, than the Marx sense of the word).
Dehumanization – To be a warfighter requires the ability to engage in a rather inhumane act – to intentionally take the life of another human being instinctually, without investigation, without thought. In order to achieve this instinct, most individuals need to have their socially acquired values and assumptions deconstructed and then reconstructed as a war fighter.
Thus, the military training regimen – beginning with basic training and reinforced in later trainings with the specificity of the role one plays as a war fighter (interrogator, drone operator, infantry, etc) – is that process of breaking down the humanity of the individual war fighter. It is a loss of self, of morality, of the value of the human being – if I’m not worthy of humanity, then no one is. This is the base line by which the robotic, instinctual war fighter can be rebuilt. But consider, we have created something of a nihilistic sociopath if successful. This process is, in my humble opinion, almost always partially, but not fully successful, leaving a tension between the old and new approach to the world.
Alienation – Most join the military with some sense of “service” to the country, a sense of honor. We believe(d) that we are the good guys. But as we are forced into wars, putting our partially achieved dehumanization to work, which strain the definitions of “defense,” “honor,” “good or evil” we suffer breaks from the idealism under which we joined and become merely task-oriented with regard to such heavy duty work. The “true believers” – those for whom the dehumanization and reconstruction into killer processes are complete – are the ones who can operate confidently and with purpose without hesitation. They are tasked with leadership. And they are at this point, each and every one in my experience, evil mofos.
So, there we have our situation – we are substantially, though not fully, dehumanized individuals, led by sociopathic nihilists, engaged in wars that the back of our minds know are unjust and unhelpful to our notions of “national defense.” We are jaded individuals carrying out our orders – playing mind games, pushing buttons and pulling triggers – trying to escape or ignore the parts of us that are screaming into a void. And then we come home – and we have to deal with, process, what we just experienced. Some ignore it for life. Others break. And everything in between on an unpredictable time table. Some can take 2-3 deployments, others (the good humans?) are broken in basic training. But these breaks and partial breaks manifest in many ways.
I am consistently frustrated that war fighter suicide discourse is compartmentalized away from other maladies over-represented in the military – substance abuse, domestic abuse, sexual violence, hazing, gambling, fighting, homelessness, fascism and on and on and on. These often get their discursive treatment, but never in relation to each other.
For me, I cope via my substance abuse (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana) and I heal through education and a redirection of my sense of “service” through anti-war, anti-imperialist activism, community organizing and, obviously, through writing (over-wrought commentary subjected upon the good people of NC 😉). What I have not found helpful, is engagement in the VAs offerings of mental health services.
thank you for this clear, cogent, and non-overwrought report from the “front”.
the service you are doing is truly heroic, life-saving i am sure, and sane.
unfortunately the peculiar mass insanity of (especially) industrial warfare is very popular among the powerful and the majority of the population they are so easily able to dupe.
your voice is an antidote to that insanity.
please do not give up or be discouraged.
@Taufiq Al-Thawry, 1:08 pm
Thank you so much for recounting your experience and understanding. It is very helpful to people like me who have never served in the military.
I second all this.
Great comment, brother!
Peace & Love 4 All!
END ALL WARS!
Shawn Ryan has interviewed a bunch of veterans who got a lot out of psychedelic assisted therapy. He himself has done it. I think the main thing they are healing is their moral injury. That is what SEALs do all day long (actually all night long) – grab people, put them in flexcuffs, load them into a helicopter, and fly them back to be tortured. How can that not mess them up?
Shawn Ryan talks about doing such therapy here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asrnXJ-xCzs
In my experience, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy is as powerful for healing trauma as psychedelic assisted therapy. They are both very effective. A good trauma therapist is a godsend.
This is new to me and interesting, though I am aware of many vets who do advocate and practice therapies involving psychedelics, as well as other non-western practices. I know little of these methods outside of the fact that many have found them very useful and to varying degrees have become practitioners themselves, offering up their services at retreats, conventions and such
And just as an aside, I’ve known very few of the JSOC (joint spec ops command) types – elite special forces, SEALS, etc. I’ve always, quite possibly erroneously, assumed they are the “true believer” types I’ve listed above and, quite frankly, they frighten me. I did get to know a special forces soldier, who did something like 8(!) operations, tours, however their stuff works. Both his body and mind were broken and he was unceremoniously thrown in the garbage as his body was useless and his behavior was increasingly erratic. He came across as something of a gentle giant, but he assured us in an even manner that he was not, while acknowledging that being around like minded vets was giving him a sense of peace he rarely experiences.
Taufiq Al-Thawry, you are a fine writer and I would like to think writing a perfect regular exercise for you and hope for more for the sake of readers as well.
Hang in there man. The community is going to offer more support than the VA if for no other reason they understand it.
I thank you for your service in activism and wish you peace.
Kinda wanted to just circle back and show appreciation for folks taking the time to read and consider my rather unscientific commentary. And I am very grateful to those who posted supportive comments. All love
Thank you for a thoughtful and profound comment. All power to you, and peace!
Taufiq…you nailed it with the term “moral injury” and the lack of discourse around that subject. I graduated college in 1968, received my draft notice at the end of that summer, signed up for the 3rd year to get noncombat. The mindf#ck started on the first day and never stopped.
I really never understood what happened until I heard that term “moral injury”.
The moral insult that I experienced was relatively minor and yet had great effect. I fortunately never took a human life.
It is known that the biggest part of military training is to erase in young men the taboo against taking human life.
I think that’s where the suicide thing comes in. Once the taboo is erased, there’s not much to prevent taking the act against oneself.
Psychedelics at first and eventually a very precious Buddhist practice have given me means to deal with the moral insult and subsequent moral injury. I am thankful for both.
Thank you for your excellent post and your mention of moral injury as something that needs more discussion.
I was very positively surprised today to find your well written and cogent commentaries. Thank you very much Taufiq. I think your contributions here honour the meaning of your name. Best regards.
Ignacio
What a powerful comment, Taufiq! Thank you for sharing your heartfelt knowledge and personal experience.
PS You have a real gift for writing.
I wonder how people like you and I would respond to each other in a meeting agreed to (in good faith, by both sides). You, someone who signed up to kill and torture, after being conned by so many lies. Myself, tortured for many years – by US “keeping you safe” industries – for the transgression of not buying the lies, knowing better (historical facts that debunked the lies), opposing the invasion, and cutting ties with biological relatives in Texas – relatives with strong, direct links to Jesus Christ and the USAF. (I am an atheist.)
I wonder if it would be a bitter, even violent waste of time, or something much better than that.
The idea was ridiculous to me before reading your post. Now I wonder.
Forgiveness & Reconciliation are the Way, my friend.
You mean Lies & Gaslighting, and no justice whatsoever. How many of the countless war crimes resulted in punisment? None, I presume (because war crime courts are made only for Slavs and Africans, and other untermesch that had to be put into their place). Real war criminals are getting thanked for their service to the satan, and are playing the victim card because the guilt interferes with their beauty sleep. The only thing missing is ritual bladder emptying of imperial do-gooders onto the graves of those that they have liberated and democratized.
I do not disagree on any point, except for the servicing Satan bit. Gotta give credit where credit is due; US soldiers served up their country to the absolute worst members of the society — very human, and the most degenerate.
Like I said, the US tortured me, but I elide any of hundreds of details because Americans who support torture from the peanut gallery do not want to believe or hear from people their beloved country tortured, and actually meeting one of them makes them apopleptic, until they can manage to get their feet slithering away as fast as possible. Yeah, I call this kind of American the worst kind coward that can be found anywhere on the planet. Americans who gleefully indulge in the practice, feel euphoria while committing the act, and paying a visit once in awhile to check in on their progress is a joy. These are some of the evil mofos Taufiq Al-Thawry refers to.
The ground pounders and droners who got it wrong are thanked, then thrown away. Some people like me, who got it right, were and are tortured until dead, or, homeless, broke, then hopefully – from the torturers’ perspective – take their own lives. Pretty evil shit, evil patriot shit. There will be no justice for a single one of us, and I will never forget nor forgive.
That vented, I am still interested in meeting Taufiq Al-Thawry, giving the benefit of the doubt in the opening minute, and see where things go.
Taufiq Al-Thawry
Thank you very much for that insiders view of all this.
As you say, the process of endless war f***s up everyone involved in it. Not just the targets and victims.
There needs to be a lot more public discussion of the good old fashioned immorality of all this.
Nearly $1 Trillion a year spent on murder and dehumanisation is not a good investment.
Good luck and best wishes to you.
Murder and dehumanisation is what USA is built upon. It seemed like a great investment back in the good ol’ days. Not much has chaged, except that those on the recieveing end and are shooting back with more modern weapons. Israel is even trying to create USA 2.0 right in front of our eyes using the same ol’ recipe, but it seems like things are not going along as smooth as they used to in the good ol’ days.
Taufiq thank you for clearly laying this all out. As I went thru the compulsory service of a non-US NATO army and was aware of the dehuminizing process during basic training, I probably wouldn’t be able to describe it as precisely as you have. I wish you peace.
Thank you for writing this. It confirms what I have speculated. I spent time in the military, but was lucky enough to have done so before the GWOT, and so never had to aim a weapon at another person under the orders of yet another person. I have been endlessly thankful for that for my entire adult life, as I am well aware that we are not the good guys.
Thank you for the valuable work that you have done since exiting the military.
>Taufiq Al-Thawry
Not often moved to tears. Thank you for your well written thoughts/ experience. I hope we can find more of your writing. You are so good with words.
When I read about the True Believers – “Tasked with leadership . . each and every one in my experience, evil mofos”.
Reminded me of John Needham. The way he was court-martialed and neglected, after asking for help. And how he tragically snapped, in the worst possible way.
You mentioned the different ways that you cope. About the alcohol. Don’t let the Evil Mofos win. Words are your weapon.
Just wanted to say these findings are also interesting to me when thinking about child abuse, especially those children who are physically and violently hit or smacked in the head or thrown and on a regular basis. Not only will they be dealing with CPTSD (versus PTSD in soldiers) but probably also have undetected brain damage. Is it any wonder these kids also have poor grades in school and aren’t great in social settings. If so, I wonder if their physical development compensates and reverses the damage as they grow older, because children do get knocked about even absent any abuse, though perhaps not as much as abused children.
Military leadership doesn’t really care. Let me describe how the end of deployment to a war zone went in the Aughts:
About a week or two before the year in Iraq was up, the units would filter through a mental health screening. From up the chain of command, unit commanders would be given to understand that there should be no or minimum number of soldiers caught in the screening. That would filter down to junior officers and then to NCOs, who would then tell soldiers to be careful what they say, otherwise their demob would be delayed for an undetermined length of time while they underwent a batteries of exams and talks and what have you. Coming in at the end of 12 months and a flight stateside this close, you can imagine how careful soldiers were during what was a very cursory screening anyway. When in doubt, Nlsome NCOs would coach individual soldiers for the questionnaire and the interview. Only very obvious mental health issues would be flagged at this point.
Once stateside there was a slightly more in-depth screening before soldiers would be officially demobed. Again, there was every incentive given to pass the screening and get on with life stateside. The command was happy to report no or minimum mental health casualties, soldier were happy to get home as quickly as possible and do their thing.
So you probably remember that a spate of suicides and violence would occur on and off-base starting about 2-3 months after soldiers had returned. For reserve and NG violence and suicides would be generally underreported, at least in the press.
About the only ones who were trying their best to stay ahead of things were the VA, though they generally would only have access to soldiers who had left the service recently and would register with the VA upon entering civilian life. For the active duty military it was all about available bodies for redeployment and soldiers undergoing treatment or being separated due to no longer being mentaly fit for service reduced that number.
That’s how it was in the Aughts and I doubt it changed much since.
Absolutely spot on… The only difference in my experience is, if I recall correctly (and I very well may not), the entirety of the mental health screening process was once we returned to our garrison base in San Antonio. This was late 2008 with regard to my only deployment. And I was stop-lossed, so I was also high-tailing it out of the army at the same time – 20 months after I was supposed to be out \O/
Another gem of a commentary here. Thank you OlFVet.
I lived for a short while in the US and then i met a few Vietnam veterans who would stop and tell me a few, may be a lot of things, after they identified themselves as Vietnam veterans. In most cases it was very difficult for me to understand what they were meaning given my difficulties with the language and i didn’t realise, wasn’t able or wasn’t willing to seriously think about what they were saying and I didn’t understand anything at all. My bad, this was probably some kind of therapy for them to make us understand their feelings and problems.
I wish OJ donated his brain…
same with this case (wish the brain was able to be studied).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_and_manhunt
Sometimes you reap what you sow.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/10-navy-seal-program-could-be-prosecuted-for-seal-trainee-kyle-mullens-death/
My argument is that candidates have to be brain damaged in the first place in order to enroll in Navy Seals.
I know this is gonna sound messed up, but when you’re in those type of Training Programs, you wanna be a bad ass. I hurt my leg (partially torn ACL) in Airborne School in 2013 week 1.
For two weeks I had to endure agony every time I ran the Airborne Shuffle or jumped. When I jumped out the plane, I had to land with my right foot slightly lower than the left to absorb the pain.
The Marine Airborne Sgt saw and asked if I wanted some Blood Wings.
Hell Yeah I do. AIRBORNE.
It was a brave thing Kyle did, and he’s def the type JSOC is looking for.
I don’t think you can train these recruits with Big Army tactics of Timeout Cards and whatnot?
“It was a brave thing Kyle did, and he’s def the type JSOC is looking for…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/us/navy-seal-training-death.html
August 30, 2022
The course began with 210 men. By the middle of Hell Week, 189 had quit or been brought down by injury. But Seaman Mullen kept on slogging for days, spitting blood all the while. The instructors and medics conducting the course, perhaps out of admiration for his grit, did not stop him.
And he made it. When he struggled out of the cold ocean at the end of Hell Week, SEAL leaders shook his hand, gave him a pizza and told him to get some rest. Then he went back to his barracks and lay down on the floor. A few hours later, his heart stopped beating and he died…
One needs to be “special” for special forces. If mafia started accepting anyone, that would make them lose renommé rather quickly.
This perhaps links tangentally to a feature in yesterday’s NC (sorry – don’t know how to wind the menu backwards) re the Military’s difficulty in attracting recruits these days, and wonder if a large part of this might be attributable to a gruesome ‘realism’ in the portrayal of war now to be found in film and tv – films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and the new, almost unwatcheable ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ or TV’s ‘Band of Brothers’ – as against those older ones featuring John Wayne single-handedly defeating the Third Reich, or our heroes dying neatly with a noble speech. If I recall correctly the TV series ‘The Pacific’ even featured an officer shooting himself casually after a shower almost as a banality. Given exposure to even this remote ‘reality’ I don’t find it surprising that ‘signing up’ loses any appeal.
I’m sure Taufiq Al-Thawry above is correct that the ‘dehumanisation’ necessary to pull the trigger on a fellow human being which is deliberately incalculated during military training and reinforced as a trait necessary for survival in actual combat, plays a large part in this – after being dehumanised the victim is expected to rejoin humanity, and rediscover his own, overnight on leaving service, pretty much on his own as though it was a natural state easy to drop back into.
On the above basis the suicide rate among the conscripted troops now in the Israeli and Ukrainian armies, whose ‘brainwashing’ must have been sketchy at least and who lack the idealism and motivation of the voluntary, must be appalling.
From personal experience, the panic-attacks took years to more-or-less get over, or at least under a semblance of control. What mostly triggered them were confined, public-spaces: I had to quit riding the L and buses, although sometimes they would happen while I was driving a car.
I came out of the military with a lot of anger, discharged to Chicago with the intention of going to school, and soon found a job as a bouncer that had hours that really worked well with my class schedule. The corporation that owned several bars took one look at me and then sent me off to their most troublesome spot: the local cops referred to it as “The Bucket of Blood” or “The Body-Count.” For where I was at, it was perfect: sex, booze, and fighting– lots of fighting. I was 6’3″, 200#, and really, really good with my feet and my fists: after every weekend I had to exchange a bloodied and torn staff shirt or two for fresh ones. When fighting, I felt nothing: no anger, no fear, no thoughts…
That lasted about 3-years. School was beginning to have an effect on me, and I had some remarkable professors as instructors. And one night, I stopped fighting: cold-turkey. I just refused to participate in that stupidity any longer, and I soon quit that job, although I later did end up in a profession for a while where the violence was much more extreme. I was very good at that too.
I’d never been actively suicidal, that’s never been more than a passing thought. But sometimes, I just didn’t care… don’t care. And the motorcycle was the perfect tool to deal with that whenever the feeling came over me: 150mph down the centerline clears the mind remarkably, and brings a sense of calm. I found that other dangerous situations could do the same.
Head injuries? Yeah, a few…
My father was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). There could be a hereditary component to it, or the head-injuries he experienced, and the hard-boozing didn’t help much either. His decline was simply revolting: unbathed for months, he’d still go to the bar in clothing soiled with dog hair, urine-stains from crotch to knees, shit oozing from his rear… a glimpse of my future? He was totally unaware that he had issues: hello, anosognosia. If he had any sense of dignity left he should have offed-himself.
I now save the drinking for the holidays– not religious about it– but fairly strict with myself on this. The FTD will be kept on my doctor’s radar at the VA, just in case: FTD has a way of striking early, and that has me thinking.
Years ago, my grandfather talked to me about his war. He had stories that I would be the only one to hear. He came back and threw himself at booze, women, and hunting, but quit two of the three after an accident where he nearly killed a kid when he fired and should have been aiming at the deer instead: no more booze, no more guns… He lived a long and peaceful life after that, and grandma got a lot of furs and jewelry as his way of making-up for frequent indiscretions.
I am now firmly committed to peaceful life, and I will not knowingly do anything that supports the war-industry. War needs to be made a thing of the past, a relic of barbarism.
“I’d never been actively suicidal, that’s never been more than a passing thought. But sometimes, I just didn’t care… don’t care. And the motorcycle was the perfect tool to deal with that whenever the feeling came over me: 150mph down the centerline clears the mind remarkably, and brings a sense of calm. I found that other dangerous situations could do the same.“
I have to admit I love dangerous situations as well and feel that same calm. I call it having the “FUCK-IT-ALLS.”
I also had panic attacks in the Army. I had one Day Zero at reception before Basic Training had even started. Literally right off the bus, they lined us up at Parade Rest, and I fn panicked. Felt like I couldn’t move but almost like I was gonna faint too. I’d always shake my knees and curl my toes to hide it.
I made it 3 more years and 1 month out of my 4 year contract. My drinking and weed smoking eventually caught up with me.
Where r u bartending in Nola these days. U in the quarter? I’m uptown and been hoping you’d out ya self so we could chat for a minute.
“: War needs to be made a thing of the past, a relic of barbarism”
But, how do you get this message across to the brainwashed civilian population?
When people were talking about ” the highway of hero’s” it always brought to mind the fact that -what is the military trained to do – kill – therefore they are nothing more than “hired killers”. Sad.
Nothing but respect and commiseration to all the vets above who’ve shared their stories here. Guys in my first bar band (I was 17 with a brand new draft card) were Viet Nam vets and they shared stories that non-vets normally don’t get to hear – the trauma was deep and still unfolding ( and remember, Nam vets were NOT considered heroes – quite the opposite :^\ ) . Fifty years later, I’m in touch with one of them – he recently laid a wife to rest who spent her last few years battling a terminal illness. He’s found an honest inner peace, smokes ample good ganja (‘California sober as they say’) and has a nice array of vintage music gear and classic vehicles. In a recent conversation, he elaborated on some of the atrocities he was a party to. His CO explained, “our job is to go in there and make these people HATE OUR GUTS! “ War is hell.
Our government is busy arranging more and more wars while our population is less and less able to fight them.
Meanwhile that same population (as a whole) is happy to elect the same people to office whose only policy is more war.
Wars are, in the end, inevitable but as a political culture, we need to get back to war as the last resort rather than the first. But perhaps everyone is having too much fun and feeling too prosperous to pay much attention.
I’m reading an interesting book on the Korean war – “The last stand of Fox Company” Interesting how so many of the men filling the ranks of this Marine company were reservists many of whom had never even been through bootcamp but whose training consisted of 30 weekends of drill. What was impressive is how quickly they either came up to speed or died.
Since there seems to be a concerted effort to end the idea of professional soldiers (the endless reference to SEALS and that odd American pass time of turning yet another group into victims ), maybe it’s time to consider a return to mass conscription in time of war and simply accept the initial slaughter that will occur as the fighters reclimb the same old learning curve.
For those who claim conscription in the US is not possible, I suggest you consider the lessons our leaders are learning form how conscription works in Ukraine. Somehow “modern” society simultaneously creates disordered minds and absolute compliance.
One aspect on the medical side: munitions technology has advanced over the decades, and US bombs explode faster and harder than ever before. The blast waves now move so quickly that they cause a new kind of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
It’s been discovered that there are tiny blood vessels through the skull which are part of the circulatory system, and are important to brain health. Because recent explosives have such fast and hard blast waves, they cause irreparable damage to these blood vessels, and the blast survivor never completely recovers.
This is one possible cause of difficulties that recent soldiers have with recovery that previous soldiers did not.
Sorry, I don’t have any cites.