PTSD

The film “Collateral Murder” (at end of this post) put Wikileaks on the map and Bradley Manning behind bars. He had, after all, committed the supreme crime againt a national security state: exposing the crimes of the national security state.

Ethan McCord was patrolling the streets of Baghdad as the events depicted in the film transpired. He was interviewed at RT (yes, we must go to Russian media to learn of American news). He was five blocks away that day, July 12, 2007.

“One guy’s head was off, the top of his head was completely off and his brains were on the ground and the smell, the smell still haunts me every day. …

A four-year old girl had been struck by bullets and had a wound to the stomach. He remembers her “looking at me and the blood around her eyes made her eyes so ghostly. He grabbed the girl and ran her into a nearby building. There he picked the glass out of her eyes so she could blink and handed her off to a medic. Then he discovered another child. Looking at the film clip he says

“That’s me right there. That is a little boy that I originally thought was dead. I couldn’t stop myself from crying.”

In popular lore and movies, soldiers shoot and kill one another without remorse. In reality, they suffer a private death, an assault on personal morality. We call it “PTSD” now. It is often just remorse and grief.

The RT story is about McCord and his treatment by the military. His commanders mocked him and threatened dishonorable discharge. He started drinking.

“And the mental health [doctor] had given me prescriptions: 13 prescriptions. … I downed all of the pills and I drank a fifth of Crown Royal at 10 o’clock in the morning and my wife at the time found me and called the ambulance.

After the attempted suicide, he was released from the military without disability, so that further treatment was not available. He contemplated suicide again, this time writing poetry while holding a gun in his mouth.

He’s still not over it.

“You know America, we were John Wayne, we were wearing the white hat. Americans were always trying to help people, that’s what we do, we try to spread freedom and democracy … with the barrel of a gun.”

Years ago, after my wife and I first met, we traveled to the Yaak region of far northwestern Montana. There we occasionally saw hitchhikers – bearded men in their forties and fifties, and not the normal ones in teens and twenties. We learned that these were men who lived in isolation in the deep woods, Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD, or whatever we called it then. I assumed that it was caused by the horrors of combat, fear of being shot at, near misses, seeing comrades die.

But this makes more sense. Ethan McCord is another war victim, and he’ll probably never recover, or might go live in the woods somewhere. His PTSD was not caused by anything done to him, but rather by what we do to others.

As they say about My Lai, what happened in Collateral Murder, the movie, is not uncommon. It’s just hushed up. That’s why PTSD and suicide is a huge problem for the military.