{"id":3033,"date":"2014-04-17T12:04:20","date_gmt":"2014-04-17T18:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3033"},"modified":"2014-04-17T12:04:20","modified_gmt":"2014-04-17T18:04:20","slug":"how-americas-wars-came-home-with-the-troops-up-close-personal-and-bloody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/how-americas-wars-came-home-with-the-troops-up-close-personal-and-bloody\/","title":{"rendered":"How America\u2019s Wars Came Home With the Troops: Up Close, Personal, and Bloody"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Ann Jones<\/a>, TomDispatch
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

After an argument about a leave denied, Specialist Ivan Lopez pulled out a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun and began a shooting spree at Fort Hood, America\u2019s biggest stateside base, that left three soldiers dead and 16 wounded.\u00a0 When he did so, he also pulled America\u2019s fading wars out of the closet.\u00a0 This time, a Fort Hood mass killing, the\u00a0second<\/a>\u00a0in four and a half years, was committed by a man who was neither a religious nor a political \u201cextremist.\u201d\u00a0 He seems to have been merely one of America\u2019s injured and troubled veterans who now number in the hundreds of thousands.<\/p>\n

Some 2.6 million men and women have been dispatched, often repeatedly, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and according to a\u00a0recent survey<\/a>\u00a0of veterans of those wars conducted by the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0and the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly one-third say that their mental health is worse than it was before they left, and nearly half say the same of their physical condition.\u00a0 Almost half say they give way to sudden outbursts of anger.\u00a0 Only 12% of the surveyed veterans claim they are now \u201cbetter\u201d mentally or physically than they were before they went to war.<\/p>\n

The media coverage that followed Lopez\u2019s rampage was, of course, 24\/7 and there was much discussion of PTSD, the all-purpose (if little understood) label now used to explain just about anything unpleasant that happens to or is caused by current or former military men and women. Amid the barrage of coverage, however, something was missing: evidence that has been in plain sight for years of how the violence of America\u2019s distant wars comes back to haunt the “homeland\u201d as the troops return.\u00a0 In that context, Lopez\u2019s killings, while on a scale not often matched, are one more marker on a bloody trail of death that leads from Iraq and Afghanistan into the American heartland, to bases and backyards nationwide.\u00a0 It\u2019s a story with a body count that should not be ignored.<\/p>\n

War Comes Home<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the last 12 years, many veterans who had grown \u201cworse\u201d while at war could be found on and around bases here at home, waiting to be deployed again, and sometimes doing serious damage to themselves and others.\u00a0 The organization Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW<\/a>) has campaigned for years for a soldier\u2019s \u201cright to heal\u201d between deployments.\u00a0 Next month it will release its own report on a common practice at Fort Hood of sending damaged and heavily medicated soldiers back to combat zones against both doctors\u2019 orders and official base regulations. Such soldiers can\u2019t be expected to survive in great shape.<\/p>\n

Immediately after the Lopez rampage, President Obama spoke of those soldiers who have served multiple tours in the wars and \u201cneed to feel safe\u201d on their home base. But what the president\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthat sense of safety… broken once again\u201d at Fort Hood has, in fact, already been shattered again and again on bases and in towns across post-9\/11 America — ever since misused, misled, and mistreated soldiers began bringing war home with them.<\/p>\n

Since 2002, soldiers and veterans have been committing murder individually and in groups, killing wives, girlfriends, children, fellow soldiers, friends, acquaintances, complete strangers, and — in\u00a0appalling numbers<\/a>\u00a0— themselves. Most of these killings haven\u2019t been on a mass scale, but they add up, even if no one is doing the math.\u00a0 To date, they have never been fully counted.<\/p>\n

The first veterans of the war in Afghanistan returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2002.\u00a0 In quick succession, four of them\u00a0murdered<\/a>\u00a0their wives, after which three of the killers took their own lives. When a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>reporter\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0a Special Forces officer to comment on these events, he replied: \u201cS.F.\u2019s don\u2019t like to talk about emotional stuff.\u00a0 We are Type A people who just blow things like that off, like yesterday\u2019s news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, much of the media and much of the country has done just that.\u00a0 While individual murders committed by \u201cour nation\u2019s heroes\u201d on the \u201chome front\u201d have been reported by media close to the scene, most such killings never make the national news, and many become invisible even locally when reported only as routine murders with no mention of the apparently insignificant fact that the killer was a veteran.\u00a0 Only when these crimes cluster around a military base do diligent local reporters seem to put the pieces of the bigger picture together.<\/p>\n

By 2005, Fort Bragg had already counted its tenth such \u201cdomestic violence\u201d fatality, while on the West coast, the\u00a0Seattle Weekly<\/em>\u00a0had tallied the death toll among active-duty troops and veterans in western Washington state at seven homicides and three suicides.\u00a0 \u201cFive wives, a girlfriend, and one child were slain; four other children lost one or both parents to death or imprisonment. Three servicemen committed suicide — two of them after killing their wife or girlfriend.\u00a0 Four soldiers were sent to prison.\u00a0 One awaited trial.\u201d<\/p>\n

In January 2008, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0tried for the first time to\u00a0tally<\/a>\u00a0a nationwide count of such crimes. \u00a0It found \u201c121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.\u201d It listed headlines drawn from smaller local newspapers:\u00a0 Lakewood, Washington, \u201cFamily Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife\u201d; Pierre, South Dakota, \u201cSoldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress\u201d; Colorado Springs, Colorado, \u201cIraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0found that about a third of the murder victims were wives, girlfriends, children, or other relatives of the killer, but significantly, a quarter of the victims were fellow soldiers.\u00a0 The rest were acquaintances or strangers. \u00a0At that time, three quarters of the homicidal soldiers were still in the military.\u00a0 The number of killings then represented a nearly 90% increase in homicides committed by active duty personnel and veterans in the six years since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.\u00a0 Yet after tracing this \u201ccross-country trail of death and heartbreak,\u201d the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>noted that its research had probably uncovered only \u201cthe minimum number of such cases.\u201d\u00a0 One month later, it\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0\u201cmore than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or [fatal] child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans.\u201d<\/p>\n

More cases were already on the way. After the Fourth Brigade Combat team of Fort Carson, Colorado, returned from Iraq later in 2008, nine of its memberswere charged<\/a>\u00a0with homicide, while \u201ccharges of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault\u201d at the base rose sharply. Three of the murder victims were wives or girlfriends; four were fellow soldiers (all men); and two were strangers, chosen at random.<\/p>\n

Back at Fort Bragg and the nearby Marine base at Camp Lejeune, military menmurdered<\/a>\u00a0four military women in a nine-month span between December 2007 and September 2008. \u00a0By that time, retired Army Colonel Ann Wright had identified at least 15 highly suspicious deaths of women soldiers in the war zones that had been officially termed \u201cnon-combat related\u201d or \u201csuicide.\u201d Sheraised a question<\/a>\u00a0that has never been answered: \u201cIs there an Army cover-up of rape and murder of women soldiers?\u201d\u00a0 The murders that took place\u00a0near<\/em>\u00a0(but not\u00a0on<\/em>) Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, all investigated and prosecuted by civilian authorities, raised another question: Were some soldiers bringing home not only the generic violence of war, but also specific crimes they had rehearsed abroad?<\/p>\n

Stuck in Combat Mode<\/strong><\/p>\n

While this sort of post-combat-zone combat at home has rarely made it into the national news, the killings haven\u2019t stopped.\u00a0 They have, in fact, continued, month by month, year after year, generally reported only by local media. \u00a0Many of the murders suggest that the killers still felt as if they were on some kind of private mission in \u201cenemy territory,\u201d and that they themselves were men who had, in distant combat zones, gotten the hang of killing — and the habit. For example,\u00a0Benjamin Colton Barnes<\/a>, a 24-year-old Army veteran, went to a party in Seattle in 2012 and got into a gunfight that left four people wounded.\u00a0 He then fled to Mount Rainier National Park where he shot and killed a park ranger (the mother of two small children) and fired on others before escaping into snow-covered mountains where he drowned in a stream.<\/p>\n

Barnes, an Iraq veteran, had reportedly experienced a rough transition to stateside life, having been discharged from the Army in 2009 for misconduct after being arrested for drunk driving and carrying a weapon. (He also threatened his wife with a knife.) He was one of more than 20,000 troubled Army and Marine veterans the military\u00a0discarded<\/a>\u00a0between 2008 and 2012 with \u201cother-than-honorable\u201d discharges and no benefits, health care, or help.<\/p>\n

Faced with the expensive prospect of providing long-term care for these most fragile of veterans, the military chose instead to dump them.\u00a0 Barnes was booted out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, which by 2010 had surpassed Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, and Fort Carson in violence and suicide to become the military\u2019s \u201cmost troubled<\/a>\u201d home base.<\/p>\n

Some homicidal soldiers work together, perhaps recreating at home that famous fraternal feeling of the military \u201cband of brothers.\u201d In 2012, in Laredo, Texas, federal agents posing as leaders of a Mexican drug cartel arrested Lieutenant Kevin Corley and Sergeant Samuel Walker — both from Fort Carson\u2019s notorious Fourth Brigade Combat team — and two other soldiers in their private hit squad who had\u00a0offered<\/a>\u00a0their services to kill members of rival cartels. \u201cWet work,\u201d soldiers call it, and they\u2019re trained to do it so well that real Mexican drug cartels have indeed been\u00a0hiring<\/a>\u00a0ambitious vets from Fort Bliss, Texas, and probably other bases in the borderlands, to take out selected Mexican and American targets at $5,000 a pop.<\/p>\n

Such soldiers seem never to get out of combat mode.\u00a0 Boston psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, well known for his work with troubled veterans of the Vietnam War, points out that the skills drilled into the combat soldier — cunning, deceit, strength, quickness, stealth, a repertoire of killing techniques, and the suppression of compassion and guilt — equip him perfectly for a life of crime. \u201cI\u2019ll put it as bluntly as I can,\u201d Shay writes in\u00a0Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming<\/em><\/a>, \u201cCombat service per se smooths the way into criminal careers afterward in civilian life.\u201d\u00a0 During the last decade, when the Pentagon relaxed standards to fill the ranks, some enterprising members of at least\u00a053 different American gangs<\/a>\u00a0jumpstarted their criminal careers by enlisting, training, and serving in war zones to perfect their specialized skill sets.<\/p>\n

Some veterans have gone on to become domestic terrorists, like Desert Storm veteran\u00a0Timothy McVeigh<\/a>, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma federal building in 1995, or mass murderers like\u00a0Wade Michael Page<\/a>, the Army veteran and uber-racist who killed six worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in August 2012. Page had first been introduced to the ideology of white supremacy at age 20, three years after he joined the Army, when he fell in with a neo-Nazi hate group at Fort Bragg.\u00a0 That was in 1995, the year three paratroopers from Fort Bragg murdered two black local residents, a man and a woman, to earn their neo-Nazi spider-web tattoos.<\/p>\n

An unknown number of such killers just walk away, like Army Private (and former West Point cadet) Isaac Aguigui, who was finally\u00a0convicted<\/a>\u00a0last month in a Georgia criminal court of murdering his pregnant wife, Sergeant Deirdre Wetzker Aguigui, an Army linguist, three years ago. Although Deirdre Aguigui\u2019s handcuffed body had revealed multiple blows and signs of struggle, the military medical examiner failed to \u201cdetect an anatomic cause of death\u201d — a failure convenient for both the Army, which didn\u2019t have to investigate further, and Isaac Aguigui, who collected a half-million dollars in military death benefits and life insurance to finance a war of his own.<\/p>\n

In 2012, Georgia authorities charged Aguigui and three combat veterans from Fort Stewart with the execution-style murders of former Private Michael Roark, 19, and his girlfriend Tiffany York, 17.\u00a0 The trial in a civilian criminal court revealed that Aguigui (who was never deployed) had assembled his ownprivate militia<\/a>\u00a0of troubled combat vets called FEAR (Forever Enduring, Always Ready), and was plotting to take over Fort Stewart by seizing the munitions control point.\u00a0 Among his other plans for his force were killing unnamed officials with car bombs, blowing up a fountain in Savannah, poisoning the apple crop in Aguigui\u2019s home state of Washington, and joining other unspecified private militia groups around the country in a plot to assassinate President Obama and take control of the United States government. \u00a0Last year, the Georgia court convicted Aguigui in the case of the FEAR executions and sentenced him to life.\u00a0 Only then did a civilian medical examiner determine that he had first murdered his wife.<\/p>\n

The Rule of Law<\/strong><\/p>\n

The routine drills of basic training and the catastrophic events of war damage many soldiers in ways that appear darkly ironic when they return home to traumatize or kill their partners, their children, their fellow soldiers, or random strangers in a town or on a base. \u00a0But again to get the stories we must rely upon scrupulous local journalists. The Austin\u00a0American-Statesman,\u00a0<\/em>for example,reports<\/a>\u00a0that, since 2003, in the area around Fort Hood in central Texas, nearly 10% of those involved in shooting incidents with the police were military veterans or active-duty service members. In four separate confrontations since last December, the police shot and killed two recently returned veterans and wounded a third, while one police officer was killed. \u00a0A fourth veteran survived a shootout unscathed.<\/p>\n

Such tragic encounters prompted state and city officials in Texas to develop a special Veterans Tactical Response Program to train police in handling troubled military types. \u00a0Some of the standard techniques Texas police use to intimidate and overcome suspects — shouting, throwing \u201cflashbangs\u201d (grenades), or even firing warning shots — backfire when the suspect is a veteran in crisis, armed, and highly trained in reflexive fire. \u00a0The average civilian lawman is no match for an angry combat grunt from, as the presidentput it<\/a>\u00a0at Fort Hood, \u201cthe greatest Army that the world has ever known.\u201d\u00a0 On the other hand, a brain-injured vet who needs time to respond to orders or reply to questions may get manhandled, flattened, tasered, bludgeoned, or worse by overly aggressive police officers before he has time to say a word.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another ironic twist. For the past decade, military recruiters have made a big selling point of the \u201cveterans preference\u201d policy in the hiring practices of civilian police departments. \u00a0The prospect of a lifetime career in law enforcement after a single tour of military duty tempts many wavering teenagers to sign on the line. But the vets who are finally discharged from service and don the uniform of a civilian police department are no longer the boys who went away.<\/p>\n

In Texas today, 37% of the police in Austin, the state capitol, are ex-military, and in smaller cities and towns in the vicinity of Fort Hood, that figure rises above the 50% mark.\u00a0 Everybody knows that veterans need jobs, and in theory they might be very good at handling troubled soldiers in crisis, but they come to the job already trained for and very good at war.\u00a0 When they meet the next Ivan Lopez, they make a potentially combustible combo.<\/p>\n

Most of America\u2019s military men and women don\u2019t want to be \u201cstigmatized\u201d by association with the violent soldiers mentioned here. \u00a0Neither do the ex-military personnel who now, as members of civilian police forces, do periodic battle with violent vets in Texas and across the country.\u00a0 The new\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>-Kaiser survey reveals that most veterans are\u00a0proud<\/a>\u00a0of their military service, if not altogether happy with their homecoming. \u00a0Almost half\u00a0of them think that American civilians, like the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, don\u2019t genuinely \u201crespect\u201d them, and more than half feel disconnected from American life.\u00a0 They believe they have better moral and ethical values than their fellow citizens, a virtue trumpeted by the Pentagon and presidents alike.\u00a0 Sixty percent say they are more patriotic than civilians. Seventy percent say that civilians fail absolutely to understand them.\u00a0 And almost 90% of veterans say that in a heartbeat they would re-up to fight again.<\/p>\n

Americans on the \u201chome front\u201d were never mobilized by their leaders and they have generally not come to grips with the wars fought in their name. Here, however, is another irony: neither, it turns out, have most of America\u2019s military men and women. Like their civilian counterparts, many of whom are all too ready to deploy those soldiers again to intervene in countries they can\u2019t even\u00a0find on a map<\/a>, a significant number of veterans evidently have yet to unpack and examine the wars they brought home in their baggage — and in too many grim cases, they, their loved ones, their fellow soldiers, and sometimes random strangers are paying the price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Ann Jones, TomDispatch click here for original article After an argument about a leave denied, Specialist Ivan Lopez pulled out a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun and began a shooting spree at Fort Hood, America\u2019s biggest stateside base, that left three soldiers dead and 16 wounded.\u00a0 When he did so, he also pulled America\u2019s fading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3034,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/jonessoldiers.jpg?fit=140%2C250&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3035,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033\/revisions\/3035"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}