Imagine if your son or daughter, wife or husband, father or mother were serving in Iraq? Most of us cannot, because we have an all volunteer military. But there are those poor unlucky few whose family members are stuck in a hellish middle eastern meat grinder, in a land where few speak their language, where most of the local people despise them, where death is a constant presence, and where President George Bush and a do nothing Congress are forcing them to remain, suffering physical and psychological stresses beyond the limits of human endurance:
Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up. […]
When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.
The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan – a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad – hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.
Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad’s international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust. […]
… It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. ‘The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,’ says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the ‘surge’ in Baghdad began.
They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: ‘We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it’s like we’ve become no more than numbers now.’
The first soldier starts in again. ‘My husband was injured here. He hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The blast shook out the plates. He’s home now and has serious issues adapting. But I’m not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted to see him I’d have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts it.’ […]
When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain’s assistant who has come to bless a patrol. ‘Why don’t you tell the truth? Why don’t you journalists write that this army is exhausted?’
It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition. There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the back fall asleep on long operations – not because they want the men alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to stay alert and wired.
But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the details of these soldiers’ frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or problems with the girlfriends that they don’t see, or about the children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them.
‘I counted it the other day,’ says a major whose partner is also a soldier. ‘We have been married for five years. We added up the days. Because of Iraq and Afghanistan we have been together for just seven months. Seven months … We are in a bad place. I don’t know whether this marriage can survive it.’
… Only a third of the regular army’s brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers – and the problem is expected to worsen.
And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army’s equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn).
But it is in the soldiers themselves – and in the ordinary stories they tell – that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.
The army’s exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences – a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.
‘They are scraping to get people to go back and people are worn out,’ said Thomas Grieger, a senior US navy psychiatrist, told the International Herald Tribune in April.
‘Modern war is exhausting,’ says Major Stacie Caswell, an occupational therapist with a combat stress unit attached to the military hospital in Mosul. Her unit runs long group sessions to help soldiers with emerging mental health and discipline problems: often they have seen friends killed and injured, or are having problems stemming from issues at home – responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of their cases. One of the most common problems in Iraq is sleep disorders. […]
‘Not only that,’ says Caswell, ‘but because of the nature of what we do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations – even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning and training for your next tour.’ Valentine adds: ‘There is no decompression.’
The consequence is a deep-seated problem of retention and recruitment that in turn, says Caswell, has led the US army to reduce its standards for joining the military, particularly over the issue of no longer looking too hard at any previous history of mental illness. ‘It is a question of honesty, and we are not investigating too deeply or we are issuing waivers. The consequence is that we are seeing people who do not have the same coping skills when they get here, and this can be difficult.
‘We are also seeing older soldiers coming in – up to 41 years old – and that is causing its own problems. They have difficulty dealing with the physical impact of the war and also interacting with the younger men.’
Valentine says: ‘We are not only watering down the quality of the soldiers but the leadership too. The good leaders get out. I’ve seen it. And right now we are on the down slope.’
We are asking these men and women, and their families, to sacrifice too much, while the rest of us go on with our lives, many of us in blissful ignorance of what they are suffering, out of the glare of the media spotlight. It is a lie to say that these people knew what they were getting into when they signed up for the military. No one — no one — could have predicted the insanity that Bush and his warmongering supporters have created in Iraq. That he would screw things up, many expected, but few saw the terrible extent to which his incompetence, delusion and deceit would lead.
Yet we sit here at home watching our own Democratic candidates backtracking on a withdrawal from Iraq, and, even worse, a Congress, ostensibly controlled by the Democrats, political leaders who were elected on a platform of changing the course in Iraq, sitting by numbly on the sidelines while Bush changed the course in Iraq — by escalating the war. There is a bumper sticker I see ever more frequently these days: “Support the Troops — Bring them Home.” But it is an empty slogan. No one in a position of power or authority is listening. Encased in their Beltway cocoon (or in Bush’s case the vacuous and spidery whisperings of his malevolent Vice President), they are ignoring this call from the people who elected them.
And when America finally does withdraw from Iraq, as we will surely do, since the cost in dollars will eventually force such a move even if the cost in lives apparently will not, these soldiers who were misled into sacrificing so much of themselves, these men and women, wounded in both body and psyche, will be looking for someone to blame for this injustice. That is the moment I fear more than any other, for when you have stripped everything away from another human being except his or her anger the consequences of that maltreatment cannot be fully foreseen. Indeed, the first blowback from Bush’s atrocity in Iraq which we are most likely to face may very well come from our own troops. And at this point, it would be hard to blame them if they took out that anger on those politicians who promised to extricate them from this morass of chaos, death and delusion, but instead chose to stand idly by while Bush destroyed their lives.
