Trained to Harm: How the Military Abuses Its Own

[babylonsister]

What we DON'T hear enough about...

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/51658/?page=1

Trained to Harm: How the Military Abuses Its Own

By JoAnn Wypijewski, The Washington Spectator. Posted May 10, 2007.

In the Army, being injured makes one deserving of cruelty.

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Today, Cho; yesterday, Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The injured soldiers at the center of that earlier scandal certainly qualify as weak and defenseless people, except that the object of fascination while they dominated the 24/7 churn of cable news was not their career as killers or the preparations that readied them to kill. They were the victims in the scandal. About the perpetrator, Walter Reed, the question "How could this have happened?" was not answered with any of the searching examination the press brings to the biography of mass murderers. Naturally, we aren't meant to think of soldiers as trained killers or of any military installation as part of an institution of mass murder. It might help if we did. Certainly it would help aspiring recruits better understand what they are getting into, and help wounded veterans understand why they would be degraded as soon as they'd outlived their usefulness to the trade.

The truth is, a system dedicated to transforming psychologically healthy people into people capable of performing what in any other setting is considered a pathological act can't help behaving badly -- not all the time or in all of its realms, not monolithically so that everyone associated with it is scathed. But inevitably the ends deform the means, and inevitably someone pays. No one is talking about it, but what happened at Walter Reed to soldiers injured in war is not shocking at all if one ponders what happens at Army posts to soldiers injured in basic training.

snip//

It was Family Weekend when I visited, and the PTRP command was on its toes because for weeks my friend, Pat deVarennes, had been writing a blog exposing the routine abuses of injured soldiers there. As a result of her persistence, the Army had initiated an investigation into the actions of a drill sergeant who had kicked a soldier in his bad knee, sending him to the floor screaming, and who had punished and terrorized the soldiers in numerous other ways. That weekend these men, on crutches and painkillers, wearing casts or moving gingerly, were not being called "fakers," "lady men," "shitsacks," "malingerers"-- the names that, at other times, were regularly hurled at them. The command met with parents and wives and told them their loved ones would be getting individualized medical attention, something many had not had for months, and reassured them that the soldiers' well-being was their chief concern.

A week later, on March 19, 2006, one of those soldiers, Pfc. Matthew Scarano, 21, was found dead in his bunk. He had been in the program for more than a year with a shoulder injury and excruciating pain. It was unlikely he would ever be fit for battle, but he could not get out. Shortly before he died, he wrote to deVarennes: "I liken being here to being incarcerated. And it often helped during the bleaker points in PTRP history to think of it as such: I'm far from being any kind of expert on the subject, but perhaps it was a psychological self-defense mechanism to try to perceive what was going on as being punitive in nature."

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After the Walter Reed scandal broke, the media fastened on the mold in Building 18 the rodents and bad food and nightmare of paperwork. But it was the Post's description of formation, the 7 a.m. lineup of injured soldiers necessary to "maintain some discipline," that most unnerved me. Every morning, regardless of weather, the injured assemble. Umbrellas are forbidden, uniforms required. Some soldiers "are so gorked out on pills that they seem on the verge of nodding off." Shades of Scarano. They are reminded to keep warm and avoid beating their spouse and children. Sometimes they are berated for the condition of their rooms or their uniforms or their attitude. There were no soldiers with missing limbs or concave skulls or rearranged faces at Fort Sill, but the condescension and barely concealed cruelty were the same. For the injured soldier, formation enacts the military's ritual of belonging while expressing its disdain. In this single act, the institution tells them that it is taking care of them and that it hates having to do so.

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[Karenina]

1. Hey Sis, do you ever wonder

if anyone really cares? :cry:

[babylonsister]

2. Yes, Karenina, all the time.

But I also realize there's so much to read on here, so don't get too discouraged. There are some articles I really wish everyone would read, but whatcha gonna do?
Thanks for caring!:hi:

And PS, this one was a heartbreaker.