A new Pentagon study funds that only forty percent of marines and fifty-five percent of soldiers stationed in Iraq would report instances of abuse to higher-ups.
Let's invert those numbers, shall we? Sixty percent of marines and forty-five percent of soldiers would shrug and look the other way if they saw their buddies beating the shit out of an unarmed Iraqi. Let's throw in another number from the study, which says that in the combined number of marines and soldiers who took part in the survey, fully ten percent of them had personally abused Iraqi civilians, either through physical violence or deliberate destruction of property.
Assuming we did not send a Dirty Dozen-style assemblage of sociopaths over to Iraq, the most likely reason for these troubling numbers comes elsewhere in the same report: Stress and anxiety levels among troops are spiking in crazy numbers as they're forced to deal with deployments lengthened bit by bit, or a second or third tour of duty they had been promised wouldn't come, at least not so soon.
The U.S. government and military have shown depraved indifference, both to the troops overcome with demons from the dark side and the Iraqi civilians who get in their way. (Reports have emerged showing a deliberate attempt to cover-up the brazen murders of women and children in Haditha, for instance.) If they can allow their subconscious to run wild over there, what can we expect when they finally return home?
Nobody wants to talk about that; nobody wants to acknowledge these men and women are living in a state of mind that permits everything, where recriminations are unlikely, where fear and paranoia are constant. They're being pushed harder and harder every day, dealing with pressures poor Cho Seung-Hui couldn't even imagine.
And then--someday, maybe--we'll expect them to come home and deal with spouses and childrens and co-workers and bosses and neighbors and all the pressure and tedium of routine existence, and expect them to somehow fit in. But they've seen things--and in many cases, done horrors--the rest of us can't even imagine. And maybe they'll deal with it.
But if they don't, then what? When a dog has been bred to kill, the dog may be put down when it attacks, but it's the owner who gets sued. If the Bushinistas have created a race of ticking time bombs as an accidental by-product of their own arrogance, who gets the blame when the shit hits the fan?
