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A MEDITATION ON WAR
03/25/2008
…..as the American death count in Iraq reaches 4000.
As the 4000th soldier was dying in Iraq, I watched the movie "In the Valley of Elah."
The movie, inspired by true events, tells the story of the murder of a soldier by his buddies after they return from a tour of duty in Iraq.
The story begins when the soldier is reported missing, continues with the discovery of the soldier's mutilated body and the attempt to find his killer(s), and ends with the confession by his buddies that they killed him.
Tommy Lee Jones plays the murdered soldier's father, a retired military police officer, who works with a policewoman to solve the case. When a soldier confesses that he and his buddies participated in the killing and the cover-up, Jones wants to hear from the soldier who first confessed the killing. In listening to the awful details of the murder, Jones' character and the viewers see how war has blunted this soldier's realization of the horror of his actions. He speaks matter-of-factly, unemotionally, as if what he did was not that unusual or horrible. It was simply something that happened, an insignificant event to someone who is irreparably damaged by war.
The horrors of war that endure long after a soldier returns from the battlefield reminded me of some of the returning Vietnam veterans I saw in my therapy practice.
Some showed me pictures of themselves before and after they went to Vietnam, pictures that chronicled their transformation from ordinary Americans to trained killers.
Some wept over their ruined marriages, their inability to relate to their wives and children, their isolation, their flashbacks, their violent inclinations, their sense of emptiness.
We see the same thing today as our men and women return from Iraq with scars that may never heal. We hear of the tens of thousands of wounded, both physically and mentally. We hear the term PTSD floated in the news, with little understanding of what that means.
Here's what it means: nightmares, flashbacks, jumping at loud noises, lashing out when touched, depression, anxiety, anger, violence, suicide, drug abuse, broken marriages, broken families, children frightened by their parents, parents unable to relate to their children.
Each story of PTSD is its own tragedy. The worst I ever heard in my office was told by a man whose marriage was ending because he ran out of the delivery room when his child was born, straight to a bar where he stayed for days. The sight of blood on his newly born child triggered a flashback to a time he had participated in a shooting which killed an infant.
And so here in America we honor our soldiers in Iraq, and we remember the 4000 who have died. (We don't even know how many Iraqis we have killed, fellow human beings who never asked for this blood feud between the Husseins and the Bushes.)
But we must also remember that war doesn't just kill bodies. War kills souls.
Military basic training may teach a soldier how to shoot a gun and how to defend himself in combat, but war can destroy his conscience.
War throws out all the rules, obliterates civility, and takes the humanity out of human beings.
By teaching a man that nothing is more important than saving his life and the lives of his buddies, war gives good men, men who would never harm anyone in civilian life, permission to shoot and bomb unarmed civilians. And when he shoots and bombs those innocent civilians, he kills something in himself. By crossing a line he would never be allowed to cross were he not wearing that uniform, he crosses a barrier of civility from which – for some – there is no return.
War destroys individuals, but it also destroys families and marriages.
War leaves behind widows, widowers, orphans, and grieving parents whose lives are forever changed, forever saddened, forever soiled.
And even when we win a war, we do not really win, because while some return from war with whole bodies, no one who participates in war – from the leaders who begin it, to the soldiers who wage it, to the civilians who endure it – escapes from war with an undamaged soul.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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