November 30, 2005

NEW YORK TIMES: WAR IS HELL

You can always count on the New York Times to shed darkness and spread confusion wherever it can in the service of its ideology and politics. Continuing what has recently become a consistent weekend feature—news for hand-wringers, for the walking worried, and for the perplexed and dismayed of the Upper West Side. Horsefeathers singles out from an array of grim possibilities something it knows a thing or two about—psychopathology.

Saturday’s front-page story below the fold is ambiguously entitled “The Struggle to Gauge War’s Psychological Cost,” by their reporter Benedict Carey, continued onto the whole of page 8. The size of the article together with its front page positioning would suggest to the innocent reader that America has major mental health problems among its young people in the armed services, and the article’s hazy, rambling style provides neither reassurance nor clarity.

NYT’s reporter Carey has no real news to report to us except that some members of the armed forces find their service stressful. But by innuendo, implication, and obfuscation he manages to suggest that the Iraqi war is a special war, a different war more likely to drive our soldiers crazy because of its moral ambiguity. “Military psychiatry has always been close to a contradiction in terms. Psychiatry aims to keep people sane; service in wartime makes demands that seem insane….This war in particular presents profound mental stresses: unknown and often unseen enemies, suicide bombers, a hostile land with virtually no safe zone, no real front or rear. A 360-degree war, some call it, an asymmetrical battle space that threatens to injure troops' minds as well as their bodies.”

Well, of course, as anyone can tell you who has studied the history of warfare over the years, such an idea is nonsense ever since Lt. Henry Shrapnel developed the concept of an anti-personnel shell at the end of the eighteenth century. This diabolic device was meant to explode into a thousand pieces, causing widespread mutilation among soldiers. Over the years with improvements in artillery technology—first timed fuses, then proximity fuses—death and mutilation by way of long-range artillery barrages became modern war’s most terrifying and effective weapon.

The proximity fuse was developed by joint British–American research and was already adopted for ground bombardment in the Second World War. This type of fuse allowed field artillery to burst shells in the air at a lethal distance above ground targets without having to establish the exact range for the fuse setting. The effect on the soldier was devastating and demoralizing because death and destruction could come at any time from some invisible enemy many miles away. And in twentieth-century wars, hundreds of millions of invisible, unexpected mutilating land mines have terrorized soldiers much like shrapnel.

Oh, and what about suicide bombing, and that war with no safety-zone, with no front and a 360 degree space? There hasn’t been a front since 1918, and why use suicide bombers when you can use homicide bombers—thousands of four-engine bombers carrying millions of tons of bombs to every corner of the globe at any time, day or night, unexpectedly. Sixty million people died in World War II, more civilians than soldiers in places like Stalingrad, Nagasaki, London, Coventry, Cassino, Berlin—a 360 degree space the world over.

Our enemies in Iraq, compared to our enemies in the past, and the amount of terror that they are capable of, compared to what our soldiers in the past have had to face, are a pathetically hapless bunch. Our enemies can cause death and mutilation only in small numbers—that is what is special about this war. So reporter Carey’s theory that what’s driving our soldiers mad is that this war is especially terrifying because of the invisibility or ambiguity of the enemy is more nonsense.

Carey’s report suggests that a large number of our fighting men and women are affected by depression, anxiety and a dubious diagnosis left over from Vietnam called a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “But just how deep those mental wounds are, and how many will be disabled by them, are matters of controversy. Some experts suspect that the legacy of Iraq could echo that of Vietnam, when almost a third of returning military personnel reported significant, often chronic, psychological problems….And at bases back home, there have been violent outbursts among those who have completed tours….And three members of a special forces unit based at Fort Carson, in Colorado Springs, have committed suicide.”

When Horsefeathers tried to confirm whether the above-mentioned set of three suicides had anything to do with their deployment overseas we ran into a helpful chap named Staff Sgt. Kyle Cosner, spokesman for the Tenth Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, who indicated that Carey knew all of the details of the story of the suicides from other journalists who had published stories about the men back in October. Carey, unfortunately, neglected to include in his report the important fact that the cases of the three men of the Tenth Special Forces unit who committed suicide had been investigated by the Army CID (Criminal Investigation Division) and that it had found that none of the suicides were thought to be connected to overseas deployment. And that in fact they each had enough psychological baggage and trouble in their personal lives to account for their acts of suicide. It is even possible that an anti-malarial medication which they all were taking may have been a cause or contributing factor in their bizarre behavior.

But reporter Carey did not think it was safe to allow his readers to make up their own minds about the connection between these suicides and whether they were attributable to their Iraqi deployment. Big Brother wants to help you think about these things. Carey justifies his distortion of the facts on the grounds that the Defense Department is politically motivated to cover up the presumably large numbers of soul-wounded men and women who are victims of the military-Bush malfeasance. “Yet for returning service members, experts say, the question of whether their difficulties are ultimately diagnosed as mental illness may depend not only on the mental health services available, but also on the politics of military psychiatry itself, the definition of what a normal reaction to combat is and the story the nation tells itself about the purpose and value of soldiers' service.”

Naturally, reporter Carey will always be able to find somebody to interview who will put the right words into his article. Here is pretty Specialist Abbie Pickett’s story (her before and after pictures appear on the front page.): “Specialist Pickett, who served with the Wisconsin Army National Guard and whose condition has been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.‘You never want family to hear that, and it's a selfish thing to say. But I'm not a typical 23-year-old, and it's hard being a combat vet and a woman and figuring out where you fit in.’ Specialist Pickett, has struggled with symptoms of depression …and a seething resentment over her service, partly because of what she describes as irresponsible leaders and a poorly defined mission. Her memories make good bar stories, she said, but they also follow her back to her apartment, where the combination of anxiety and uncertainty about the value of her service has at times made her feel as if she were losing her mind.”

Since war has been studied in modern times, it has been observed that there are a great many factors in war situations that may play a role in the development of psychopathology: length of exposure to battle, the quality of leadership, the unit morale, rest, food, physical relief from the weather and—most of all—pre-war psychological strength, adaptability, and emotional maturity. It is almost never any one bombardment or battle that will result in severe pathology, but a combination of many aggravations and chronic things which combine with a sensitive and troubled personality.
Psychiatric experience and practice indicates that something very similar is at work in everyday life. One finds in practice that almost anything can become a “trauma” or trigger that can stimulate chronic pathology—childbirth, puberty, the onset of menstruation, loss of a loved one, job loss, marriage, divorce—almost anything that has serious emotional meaning. Strangely enough, the connection between the triggering experience and the chronic symptomatology is not easy to connect. Often there are one or more intervening layers of psychological symptoms, such as chronic drinking, or weight gain, or chronic school failure.

The main point in this context is that there is little likelihood of military service triggering a chronic psychological illness without some degree of latent pre-military psychopathology. At the end of the article even Carey must acknowledge this clinical fact by quoting that “…others say that the rates of the disorder are just as likely to diminish in the next year, as studies show they do for disaster victims….Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, said that given the stresses of this war, it was worth noting that five out of six service members who had seen combat did not show serious signs of mental illness….The emotional casualties, Colonel Ritchie said, are ‘not just an Army medical problem but a problem that … the civilian system… as a whole must work to solve.’”

Carey’s report is characteristic of the NY Times’ pseudo-analytical journalism—deep trash. It identifies a “problem,” gets several experts to provide quotes that state the Times’ point of view, a couple of paragraphs of muddled and contradictory statistical facts which are either meaningless or, worse, obfuscating. Then come two or three interviews with the disgruntled victims of the injustice that the Times has identified, in this case stress caused by a morally ambiguous war brought about by poor leadership. And finally, what is most reprehensible is that the interviewees either do not realize they are being exploited by the Times’ reporter, or they—the “victims”—and the reporter are exploiting each other.