“They Were Soldiers” Author Discusses High Cost of War for America’s Veterans

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http://truth-out.org/news/item/19992-how-easily-americans-forget-the-physically-and-psychologically-wounded-veterans-of-the-post-9-11-wars-a-national-shame



Ann Jones: "As I followed the sad trail of damaged veterans to write my new book...I came to see how much they and their families have suffered...from the delusions of this nation’s leaders."

“They Were Soldiers” Author Discusses High Cost of War for America’s Veterans
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | News
Wednesday, 13 November 2013 10:27

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MARK KARLIN: What drew you toward writing a book about the devastating psychological impact and physical injuries of so many soldiers who return alive from our wars abroad, particularly Afghanistan and Iraq?
ANN JONES: After 9/11, I went to Afghanistan to try to be of help to women and girls. Soldiers were the last people on my mind. Then, after some years, the US military in Afghanistan came up with the idea of forming Female Engagement Teams (FETs). American women soldiers were to "engage" with Afghan women in the villages and persuade them to divulge critical intelligence about Taliban war plans and troop movements. Of course, I was curious about women soldiers - I've spent my life writing about women - and those women soldiers in Afghanistan seemed to be getting roped in to yet another clueless, bound-to-fail military scheme. So after eight years of writing about civilians in Afghanistan and other conflict zones, I embedded for the first time with US troops at a forward base on the Pakistani border where an FET was being trained. What happened with the FET is another story, but while I was on that base, I happened to witness the total breakdown of a soldier - a man. He went to pieces, almost literally it seemed, not knowing he was observed. After that, I began to see male soldiers with new eyes. Patrols left that base every day, and often they came back missing men. Where had they gone? I had seen photos in American newspapers of severely wounded veterans, always described as "heroic" and "resilient," skiing on prosthetic legs with smiles on their faces. I wanted to know what happened to them in between the catastrophe and the ski slope. And how many of those terribly damaged soldiers, and their family members, wound up smiling.

MARK KARLIN: How do these long-term wounds shatter their families and communities?
ANN JONES: Every soldier comes back more or less changed. Family members and friends, who remember them differently, often can't seem to find the old familiar patterns of love and friendship. A stunning number of parents feel that the soldier who came back to them is not their real son or daughter - as in those old sci-fi films about aliens who assume human bodies and betray their presence only by a peculiar gleam in the eyes. Many family members and friends are vaguely afraid. They don't want to confront the veteran they love when things are bad - when the vet is drinking or drugging or beating up his girlfriend - for fear of making things worse. And when the vet seems somewhat better, parents and wives don't want to rock the boat. So every day is a surprise. Life becomes chaotic. Lived on tiptoe. It's exhausting. Parents may come to blame each other, and wives to blame themselves. Small children are diagnosed with anxiety disorders. Someone has to take care of these vets. Usually it's Mom who has to quit her job and become a full-time caretaker. Maybe Dad has to take a second job to make ends meet. Or maybe he "moves on." Families that stick together often are able to do so only because someone - usually Mom - gives up her life to devote it to what's left of her child. When a veteran kills himself, as so many do, parents and siblings are devastated, and sometimes suicidal as well. Or a wife may be left behind - a young woman who has never held a job, with a couple of kids to raise, and no death benefit because her husband died of war but not in it. Then again, many guys who return from the wars can't stop being violent. Many of them abuse and murder their wives or girlfriends or children, and surprisingly often they kill other soldiers and random strangers. They destroy their own families and others as well.

MARK KARLIN: In this sense, as you point out in your introduction, our wars never really end, even if they are officially over. They just recede, as you write, "from public to private life." But if we are one of those fortunate enough not to be impacted by the ripple effect of the living wounded, we think that a given war is finished, isn't that right?
ANN JONES: Exactly. Men make war. (There's no getting around the fact that war is a guy thing.) Then they make a deal to stop shooting and withdraw. (The US once used to win wars, but now it just makes deals.) They call the cessation of armed violence against one another's armies "peace," although violence against civilians continues - as is the case in Iraq today - and individual soldiers bring their violence home. Wives and parents trying to live in peace at home with veterans today feel the burden placed on them to adapt to the vet's volatility, to humor him and ward off the violence he might do to himself and others. They get no peace. And all taxpayers, whether they recognize it or not, will continue to be deeply involved in these wars long after official "peace" is declared. Medical and disability payments alone for veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq already have cost taxpayers $135 billion, and those costs won't peak until close to midcentury - topping out at an estimated $754 billion. The total cost of these two wars to date is well above $3 trillion and rising, while the government, having failed to raise taxes to pay for them, now takes a hatchet to social programs as basic as education, women's shelters and food stamps - programs that once helped the poor to rise. If war has changed soldiers in fundamental ways, it has also transformed the country in ways equally heartbreaking.

~snip~

MARK KARLIN: Ongoing press reports indicate US vets who served in Afghanistan and Iraq have a high suicide rate. Are we - the Pentagon and our society - providing inadequate support to help these members of our armed forces cope with the demons unleashed by war?
ANN JONES: The support vets get seems to be well-intentioned, unreliable, inadequate, often inappropriate and, in the heavy reliance on medications, lethal. Countless soldiers have taken their lives while waiting for an appointment at the VA, or after having been denied hospitalization or treatment. Some of the saddest stories I heard came from distraught families who had tried desperately and failed to get help from the VA for their suicidal soldier. On the other hand, many vets who commit suicide are being treated at the VA, although not necessarily for suicidal thoughts. For years, the Big Pharma companies have conducted a massive campaign to persuade the VA to prescribe opioid painkillers for any and every instance of pain - from those commonplace orthopedic injuries to a toothache - and opioids have proved to be not only highly addictive but also conducive to suicide. The most important way we fail soldiers, however, is by sending them to unnecessary wars in the first place. There was no reason for any of these soldiers to be wounded or killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, or ever to have left home, except for the foolish delusions and arrogant ideology of politicians in power who got off on dressing up in military uniforms and playing commander-in-chief. They are the demons who unleashed the wars that unleashed the demons that did in the soldiers.