Surprise. The killing doesn’t stop when the deployment is over:
NEW YORK (AP) Jan. 13 - At least 121 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have committed a killing or been charged in one in the United States after returning from combat, The New York Times reported Sunday. [The same New York Times which now employs one of the war's leading mongers, William Kristol... just sayin'...]
The newspaper said it also logged 349 homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans in the six years since military action began in Afghanistan, and later Iraq. That represents an 89-percent increase over the previous six-year period, the newspaper said.
About three-quarters of those homicides involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the newspaper said. The report did not illuminate the exact relationship between those cases and the 121 killings also mentioned in the report.
The newspaper said its research involved searching local news reports, examining police, court and military records and interviewing defendants, their lawyers and families, victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials.
Defense Department representatives did not immediately respond to a telephone message early Sunday. The Times said the military agency declined to comment, saying it could not reproduce the paper’s research.
A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, questioned the report’s premise and research methods, the newspaper said. He said it aggregated crimes ranging from involuntary manslaughter to murder, and he suggested the apparent increase in homicides involving military personnel and veterans in the wartime period might reflect only “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.”
Neither the Pentagon nor the federal Justice Department track such killings, generally prosecuted in state civilian courts, according to the Times.
The 121 killings ranged from shootings and stabbings to bathtub drownings and fatal car crashes resulting from drunken driving, the newspaper said. All but one of those implicated was male.
About a third of the victims were girlfriends or relatives, including a 2-year-old girl slain by her 20-year-old father while he was recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq.
The rest here. Well, exactly what would we expect? Exactly why would any of this surprise anybody? Training someone to become a killer means just that: dehumanizing them, and dehumanizing those whom he would kill. Teaching him what he needs to know to do this while working over his psyche so that he loses all conscience or any compunction against doing so. Removing all the moral and ethical checks and balances that had been instilled in his heart, mind, and soul over the first eighteen years or so of his life, and turning him into a sociopath. And then, after he does what “his country” has asked him to do, what he “volunteered for,” we throw him back into “normal life,” without any rehabilitation or any sort of psychic healing. In fact, we treat any indications that he might be having problems as a sign of “weakness.” We deny his problems, and we deny him access to adequate mental health care (not that society gives a big enough hoot about that anyway). We expect him to “suck it up, be a man, and get on with it.” And then when someone actually has the audacity to publicize the fact that there is a problem here, the military does what it always does: deny, deny, deny, and then cast aspersions on the messenger.
And this is what we get. A undeniable – and growing - body count here at home.
A surge of murder, committed by our own.
Filed under: General outrage, Health care, News & commentary, Peace testimony, War & militarism
War benefits the people who stand to make money off the endeavor, much to the detriment of the individual soldier and all of us in the process.
In this war, many men and women both have volunteered because their signing bonus has been ample and their pay has been excellent. This does not overlook, however, the unforeseen results of combat. These men and women chose their occupation but many of them have no conception of how it shapes them personally. At least not until they return from active duty and try to re-adjust to civilian life.