On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. forces launched an offensive in Afghanistan with the aim of dismantling the al-Qaeda terror network and driving the radical Islamist Taliban government from power. That was a decade ago, and the war goes on. Today, the U.S. finds itself facing a clear but intractable question: How do we end wars? As the “long wars” of Afghanistan and Iraq rumble on, the answer becomes more elusive and more vague. In an August 2010 speech, President Obama described how the world had entered a new era, “an age without surrender ceremonies.” Perhaps Obama remembered that ... Read More
Myth of the Modern Religious War
September 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Not long ago, a church leader at the Protestant sect I belong to gave a sermon criticizing the role of religion in today's conflicts. He cited the Crusades, clashes between Catholics and Protestants, and other "religious wars" of the Middle East and throughout Asia. It made me wonder how prevalent these are, given that many of these conflicts cited either occurred a long time ago or are predominantly fought over other reasons. The political science literature on the subject is overshadowed by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, frequently cited by the mainstream media and numerous ... Read More
Film Recalls U.S.’s First Overseas Guerilla War
August 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
If nothing else, John Sayles’ latest film, Amigo, reminds us that when the U.S. becomes involved in foreign insurgencies, it generally combines arrogance with abysmal cluelessness. Think of it as a case of “the more things change, the more they stay the same” — and it’s been going on for more than 100 years. Amigo takes place in 1900 in the Philippines. America has just won the Spanish-American War and is occupying the islands it has taken from Spain with absolutely no intention of giving them their independence. So, a native insurgency, known as the Insurrectos, led by Emilio ... Read More
PTSD Therapy: Restoring Honor to the Enemy
August 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One side of post-traumatic stress that not many people talk about — maybe because it's so hard to separate from waging a modern war — is the way a nation and its military tend to dehumanize the opposing side. Erich Maria Remarque's novel about World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, took dehumanization as its theme, and it still has a lot to say about war trauma even if Americans have cornered the market on clinical descriptions of PTSD. All Quiet follows a young, German soldier named Paul Bäumer through the trenches of the war in France. He's a tough-skinned narrator with no ... Read More
Vets With PTSD Awarded Higher Disability Benefits
July 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Associated Press reports today that "more than a thousand Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder would be given lifetime disability retirement benefits such as military health insurance under the terms of a settlement reached between the government and the veterans." The veterans had filed a class-action lawsuit in response to the slow pace of the U.S. military's review of their cases, in which they argued that their disability benefits were lower than that to which they were legally entitled. Michael Scott Moore has reported on PTSD extensively for ... Read More
A Brief History of Combat Trauma
July 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One side effect of NATO's 10-year war in Afghanistan is a steady rise in post-traumatic stress in Western Europe — especially Germany and Britain — for the first time since World War II. The statistics are small compared to America's, but German experts were startled by a spike in the number of registered PTSD victims in the Bundeswehr, or German military. The Germans unexpectedly found themselves not in a peaceful reconstruction project but in a war. Car bombings and other attacks against German troops flared in provinces like Kunduz between 2006 and 2009, and the number of PTSD cases ... Read More
PTSD’s Trauma Symptoms Ring Out Through Ages
June 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The irony of post-traumatic stress disorder is that it sounds modern — the term is so clinically bureaucratic some people think it may be the invention of some American psychological board. But the symptoms have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, or perhaps as long as there have been people. The symptoms were called "nostalgia" in the Civil War, "shell shock" in World War I, and Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam, has pointed out that The Iliad may be the first work of literature based on combat stress. But Samuel Pepys may be the earliest historical figure ... Read More
PTSD Affecting More U.S. Soldiers Than British
June 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Combat stress is still a murky and sometimes taboo element of soldiering, but one of the strangest discoveries is that the strain isn't evenly spread among vets from different countries. For example: A far higher percentage of American soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq and Afghanistan than British soldiers do. Americans involved in those wars have suffered from PTSD at a rate of 30 percent, compared to 4 percent among Brits, according to a study published by the U.K.'s Royal Society of Medicine. And researchers say the difference isn't a reflection of ... Read More
Was Osama bin Laden’s Burial Handled Correctly?
May 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It is one of the oldest moral conflicts in world culture: what to do with the body of your slain enemy. The body of Osama bin Laden was buried at sea, according to the White House, apparently in order to prevent his burial place from becoming a shrine. But might the manner of that burial, and the denial of his body to his family, ultimately foster an even greater "martyr" myth? This conflict can be traced back to Greek mythology and the tragedy of Antigone (as written by Sophocles, in the 5th century B.C.). Antigone's brother, Polyneices, rebelled against their city, Thebes, and was ... Read More
