They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story by Ann Jones. (Haymarket Books/Dispatch Books 2013), 191 pages.
Members of the American armed forces are props. They wave from convertibles as Independence Day parades make their way down Main Street U.S.A. They are trotted out at football games to bless the proceedings as some kind of martial event. They wish us happy holidays from countries many Americans can’t find on a map. The traditional narrative is that these men and women are the best of us. They risk life and more likely than not limb to protect us from al-Qaeda or rogue states such as Iraq or Iran. They are the vanguard of liberty, knocking down odious regimes so that freedom can be planted in foreign soil and contribute to a democratic peace sometime in the near future.
Ann Jones will have none of that. Her They Were Soldiers is a suppurating wound of a book — the 21st-century equivalent of Dalton Trumbo’s horrifying antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. It’s an embedded look at how America’s wounded return from its wars, divided into three parts: the wounds you can’t miss, the wounds hiding just below the surface, and the wounds violently shared with the families and communities they come home to. Haunting and uncompromising, Jones’s book wants to grip the American public by its collective face and waterboard it into the nightmare of war and its aftermath — no tales of valor, no talk of bands of brotherhood, no nonsense about making the world safe for democracy.
Rather she writes about unnecessary death and dismemberment and the utter horror of war and its aftermath in intelligently restrained prose, her outrage only flashing through sporadically, like lightning on a darkened plain. It’s a book that whispers, “Here’s what war is really like, young buck. Let it seep in before you sign on the dotted line and you no longer belong to you.” Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that rip soldiers’ genitals into a fleshy mess or that vaporize soldiers into a red rain showering down on their brothers-in-arms … troops who betray their consciences and commit atrocities that haunt them, regardless of how many drinks or pills they swallow … families beside themselves with grief, not because their sons never returned home, but because they did, only changed … soldiers who wear the uniform, not to serve their countries, but because it gives them an opportunity to act out their ghastly urges and get slaps on the back for it — that is the Army of One hidden by the Pentagon from the young and the foolhardy, who see themselves as invincible, as kids are apt to do.
Broken in body
The advance of modern medicine has significantly reduced the American fatalities in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as IEDs become more and more powerful. While that seems like something to cheer, often the nature of troops’ injuries described by Jones shows that there are things far worse than death. As a Navy surgeon told her, after two months at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, “Nothing in my experience prepared me for the catastrophic nature of these injuries.” Case in point: his first surgical patient, a young soldier upended by an IED. “To have to amputate that boy’s penis and watch it go into the surgical waste container — it was emotional.” An ER nurse, also at Bagram, summarized her typical case: “Amputees up to the waist. No arms. No legs. No genitals. Age 21 or 22. We cry.” Medical staff try to find silver linings in all this hurt.
A trauma-unit doctor tells Jones that the cutting-edge medical procedures developed during war eventually improve civilian medicine. “Maybe so,” writes Jones, “but I wonder if this is to be the civilians’ reward for paying taxes into the war chest: the possibility of getting a combat-experienced brain surgeon when we’re shot in the head at the mall.”
Invisible wounds
Other grave injuries fly under the radar. This “invisible wound,” as Jones describes it, is traumatic brain injury (TBI). Known to earlier generations as “shell shock,” TBI pre-sents an enormous challenge to military neurologists, writes Jones, because “if the wound is invisible, how can you spot it?” Often brain scans will come back perfectly normal even though the patient’s brain is badly damaged. Rest is the generally prescribed treatment for TBI, but because there’s no empirical evidence of injury, the military fears creating incentives for soldiers to shirk duty. “The military command, always on the lookout for malingerers, also worries about treating soldiers too well,” notes Jones. “Give some soldier a diagnosis and a break, and others will soon present themselves with similar symptoms — or so the classic argument goes — and the next thing you know, they will all be applying for disability benefits.” Conversely, injured veterans and service members are fed, often irresponsibly, a pharmacological diet of pills by military and private doctors, courtesy of Big Pharma. In 2001 Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars marketing its poppy-based painkiller, the same plant that soldiers would soon be eradicating in Afghanistan, to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nine years and two wars later, Big Pharma was making serious bank, and veterans weren’t the only target. “One third of the soldiers in the Army were on prescription medications in 2010, and nearly half of them — 76,500 — were on opioid painkillers,” Jones writes.
Sometimes they’re peddled like Tic Tacs for the slightest of injuries. One mother told Jones that an Army doctor prescribed her son, Lance Pilgrim, OxyContin for a broken finger. Soon her son was using the pills to deal with whatever nastiness he experienced during the invasion of Iraq. In 2007 an Army treatment center prescribed hydrocodone, another opioid, after kicking him out for fighting with another veteran. Pilgrim died two days later of an overdose. His mother doesn’t know whether it was intentional or a mistake.
Broken in spirit
All service members who don’t die in theater eventually head home. Whether physically wounded or not, all have to adjust to civilian life. The war, they find out like Lance Pilgrim, follows them wherever they go.
Jeffrey Lucey, a Marine reservist, returned home in the summer of 2003. Things went downhill fast. He drank excessively, vomited daily, and lost his appetite. He crashed two cars. He didn’t sleep. He became withdrawn, refusing to go to family Christmas parties. On Christmas Eve his sister checked up on him and found him crying. He took two Iraqi dog tags from around his neck and threw them at her, uttering, “Your brother is nothing but a murderer.” One night the next summer Jeff sat down on his father Kevin’s lap. He did that when he was a boy, and he began doing it again after he returned from Iraq. The next time Kevin saw his son, he was hanging in the cellar, a double-looped plastic hose around his neck. Neatly laid out on his bed were the two Iraqi dog tags he had thrown at his sister on Christmas Eve. Before he died Jeff had admitted, in his father’s presence during a visit to a VA psychiatrist, to executing two Iraqi prisoners. The Marines said they investigated and found Jeff’s allegations false.
His parents knew their son wasn’t lying.
The Luceys were not quiet about what war had done to their son and what he did in war. They spoke with the media and at public gatherings and schools frequently. They were scheduled to testify before Congress about their son’s unraveling, but their invitation was revoked when congressional schedulers learned that they had consorted with antiwar groups. “The irony that the story of their soldier son’s fate is off limits only within the government that sent him to war is not lost upon the Luceys,” writes Jones. It is telling that soldiers connected the Luceys to antiwar groups and asked them to speak out against the war because service members cannot while in uniform.
But it really isn’t surprising that neither Congress nor the Pentagon wants to face publicly the tremendous toll of war on America’s boys and girls. Jeff Lucey was one of the 2,293 service members who committed suicide between 9/11 and September 2011, a very conservative estimate, according to Iraq Veterans Against the War, because the Pentagon doesn’t count suicides of service members who have been thrown out of the military or who have resigned their post. When asked by Congress to explain the suicide crisis in the military, the Pentagon had a list of “stressors” — such as relationship issues, work-related problems, money problems, legal problems, drug- and alcohol-abuse problems — which could trigger suicide. “Conspicuously absent from the list of triggers of soldier suicide,” Jones notes, “was the experience of war itself and the brutal betrayals of ‘what’s right’ that lie at its heart.”
Which makes sense, because what politician or military official could possibly defend sending America’s young off to wars of choice knowing full well what will befall them there? And who wants to consider that this epidemic of military suicides isn’t just the result of post–traumatic stress syndrome caused by physical or psychic traumas experienced in war, but rather the inability of men and women to live with themselves after invading nations and killing and murdering belligerents and innocent civilians alike? Is it so hard to believe that instead of facing a perpetual dark night of the soul every second of every day, many, like Jeff Lucey, opt for a permanent midnight?
Instead, American culture glorifies the heroic, sacrificing (or sacrificial) soldier in the abstract, with no real concern for the individual men and women who give up their lives — whether they die or not — for a lie.
Horrific homecomings
The darkness doesn’t just stalk those who return from Iraq and Afghanistan; sometimes it becomes them. And out of that darkness, a fiery rage builds up in their bowels. The fire often doesn’t remain inside. Rather it consumes the ones they love, and sometimes the fire engulfs everything around them.
Jones documents incident after incident of military members, always male, raping, brutalizing, and murdering comrades, family members, and people at random. Here’s just a choice selection from 2012 cataloged by Jones. Army veteran Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, shoots up a house party on New Year’s Day and then flees to Mount Rainier National Park, where he kills a park ranger. He dies after drowning in a frigid stream. Two weeks later, former Marine and Iraq war veteran, Itzcoatl Ocampo, 23, is suspected of murdering six: the mother and brother of a high-school friend and four homeless men arbitrarily. Also that January, Army Sergeant Vincinte L. Jackson murders a female soldier by strangling and stabbing her 74 times. Seven months later, Army veteran Stephen Carriero, 25, attacks an 82-year-old woman and murders her 62-year-old daughter “after raping and sodomizing her with instruments the police refused to name.” And on and on. If you don’t believe her, Jones recommends Googling “veterans’ homicides” or “veterans’ crimes” and then you can “write a chapter like this yourself, if you can bear the work.”
Sometimes it’s hard not to speculate that some of the men are punishing us because they were sent off to immoral and unwinnable wars that turned them into something else altogether. “Many of the murders smacked of something truly threatening — a kind of private warfare waged by soldiers who had got the hang of killing and the habit,” writes Jones. Do they want to make us bear witness to the monsters made by the negligence of collective bloodlust, which all too suddenly slid into apathy? Be warned, they seem to screaming: “The strings have been severed, and the marionettes have turned on their masters.” Their rage, however, hasn’t registered beyond the little radii of terror they’ve left in their short but terrible trails. Maybe that will change as many more killing machines, who cannot be reprogrammed for civilian life, return home from Afghanistan.
A con game
On a military flight back to the United States, an older Army officer — an adviser to the top counter-terrorism official in Iraq, to be precise — waves Jones over to the seat beside him. He has something to tell her. “I’ve been in the army twenty-six years,” he says, “and I can tell you it’s a con.” He sums it up something like this: the poorest 1 percent go far away from home to kill and be killed in wars that make the other 1 percent “[expletive deleted] rich.” He’s on his way home, permanently, because of “psych reasons.” He goes on to mention he has two sons, both in college. “They won’t have to serve,” he says. “Before that happens, I’ll shoot them myself.” Here Jones has found her very own U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, who’s telling us once again that “war is a racket” that serves the corporatists and the powerful, while grinding up all the sons and daughters, fathers and mothers sent to it. War, he’s telling us, is a criminal enterprise, one that traffics in murder, theft, and corruption. The beneficiaries: global gangsters with flags pinned to their lapels.
Before the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military flew over Iraq and dropped leaflets warning Iraqis of the liberation coming their way very, very soon. How apt it would be if someone flew over the Pentagon as well as every military recruiting office and dropped Ann Jones’s book — the journalistic equivalent of the flower in the rifle barrel. They Were Soldiers should be pushed across the kitchen table to any young man or woman thinking about enlisting, prominently displayed in every high-school library, and slapped into the chest of every chicken hawk who glorifies war but curiously never enlisted after 9/11. It’s a horror story of the most deeply disturbing kind: a true one.
This article originally appeared in the May 2015 edition of Future of Freedom.
