NYT misfires on veterans story
[Phillip Carter,
Sunday January 13, 2008 at 11:08am ]
Sunday's New York Times features a lengthy front-page article titled "Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles" — what it bills as Part I of a "series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home."Right..... Because we all know that all veterans are coming home crazy, shell-shocked, and ready to kill their friends and loved ones. Here's how the NY Times staff produced this sensational story:
The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.So, basically, the reporters went trolling on Lexis-Nexis and other databases to find "murder" within the same paragraph as "veteran" or "soldier," and built a front-page story around that research. They compared the pre-war numbers to the post-war numbers and found that, voila!, there's a difference. And then it looks like they cherry-picked the best anecdotes out of that research (including the ones where they could get interviews and photos) to craft a narrative which fit the data.
Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.
* * *
The Pentagon does not keep track of such killings, most of which are prosecuted not by the military justice system but by civilian courts in state after state. Neither does the Justice Department.
To compile and analyze its list, The Times conducted a search of local news reports, examined police, court and military records and interviewed the defendants, their lawyers and families, the victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials.
This reporting most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on military bases, are reported publicly or in detail. Also, it was often not possible to determine the deployment history of other service members arrested on homicide charges.
The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower.
The Pentagon was given The Times’s roster of homicides. It declined to comment because, a spokesman, Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, said, the Department of Defense could not duplicate the newspaper’s research. Further, Colonel Melnyk questioned the validity of comparing prewar and wartime numbers based on news media reports, saying that the current increase might be explained by “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” He also questioned the value of “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide.”
The article makes no attempt to produce a statistically valid comparison of homicide rates among vets to rates among the general population. Nor does it rely at all on Pentagon data about post-deployment incidents of violence among veterans. It basically just generalizes from this small sample (121 out of 1.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan vets, not including civilians and contractors) to conclude that today's generation of veterans are coming home full of rage and ready to kill.
I've got a one-word verdict on this article and its research: bullshit.
To be sure, the article contains many truths about the struggles veterans face when they come home. Combat sears the mind and body in ways we can only begin to understand. An increased propensity to violence has been noted among veterans of previous wars, and by commanders supervising troops coming home from this one. However, there's a long road from those observations to the conclusions in this article, and the evidence simply doesn't add up in this story.
More broadly though, I worry about the larger narrative of this story. It seems like we've been down this road before — casting veterans in the role of crazed, violent, disturbed young men who come home from war to become homeless or criminal (or both). America needs to wrap its arms around its sons and daughters who go to war, not alienate them and push them away with this kind of narrative. We sent these men and women to fight; we have a sacred trust to ensure they're taken care of when they come home. Irresponsible journalism like this impedes that effort by giving people the wrong impression about combat veterans. I'm disappointed in the New York Times for running this story, and for giving it such prominence.Update I: Abu Muquwama — himself an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran — notices the Rambo connection too, and also notices the ironic placement of a Style piece in today's paper about Rambo and tough guys. Hmmm...
Update II: Marc Danziger at Winds of Change also criticizes the article, and notes the lack of any statistical comparison between veterans and the base population. Using some publicly available stats and a little back-of-the-envelope math, he concludes that these homicide rates actually look lower than that among the general population. Marc thinks the Times left this point out because "it's not part of the narrative of how our soldiers are either depraved or damaged." Perhaps. But whether this omission of statistical analysis was intentional, irresponsible or simply amateurish, it's still wrong.
Related Posts (on one page):
- One veteran's story
- NYT misfires on veterans story
0 Trackbacks /
Hello?
I read the article earlier today and wondered what the basic statistical data really were. As I suspected, none too sound. Of course the basis for the comparison would have to be a similar non-veteran group, same age and income structure, education, ratio of males and females and so on.
Rather what I expected from the NYT.Many thanks for looking at it more closely in your excellent blog. I am sure I ll look in more often in the future.
To which Cutter John says, "actually, I'd just like to walk again."
I very much would like Hollywood to retroactively take all the pseudo-pop-psych movies like Rambo and burn them.
As for statistics of vets going postal...give me those same data points and I can lay the blame squarely on their mothers forcing them to eat vegetables they didn't want to eat.
Perhaps Veterans who volunteer are highly motivated individuals, with high levels of self sufficiency, and such people don't do a lot of random killing.
Just a thought.
'Both In One Trench: Saddam's Secret Terror Documents'
Book Website
Good post, but I think you overstate your "beef" with the Times. The fact is, you can't make a clean comparison with the "general" population because the veteran population (more so pre-2003) was a self-selecting group that ostensibly did not include those with criminal history, below 31% intelligence, mental illness etc.
A clean comparison is impossible. That said, the raw numbers alone are shocking and worrisome --- most especially that 75% of these criminals were on ACTIVE DUTY WHEN THEY COMMITTED THEIR CRIMES!!!
The Times did a comparison with murders committed by active duty personnel for the 6 years pre-9/11 and the 6 years post 9/11. If I recall, there was something like an 89% INCREASE in the number of murders/homicides/manslaughter committed by active duty personnel seen from '01-'07 vs. '95 to '01 despite the fact that LESS personnel were stationed stateside during that time.
The fact is, that we have no clear study on the impact of repeated deployments on an increasingly lower quality (mentally, physically, morally) junior enlisted force. The Army has not been forthright in conducting this analyisis because they are afraid of the answer. I have a friend (USAR CPT w/ PhD in Epidemiology) who just finished a tour at WRAIR and he confirmed that the Army study underway to compare the # of deployments v. adverse mental health effects is seriously flawed and fails to factor in the effects on the population that for medical, criminal or administrative reasons fails to complete tours or has an adverse incident and is not redeployed. In other words, the Army study is biased towards the MOST resillient individuals who successfully complete the most tours.
In closing, I have questions that I'd like answered, namely the effect (if any) of the misguided 24-7-365 "warrior posture" in effect in the stateside Army. Unlike past wars, or even the pre-2005 BDU era, there is no "normal" provided by leadership in CONUS. Everyone is in ACUs and desert boots both in theater and at home as well as recruiting, the Pentagon and Walter Reed. There is no "normal" and Army leadership is unknowingly creating a feeling of misplaced guilt in those currently nondeployed. This is a problem. There is no normal. Home station for the RA junior enlisted is 12 months between Iraq deployments. Look at the most recent "Army strong" TV ads or the National Guard ad campaign - soldiers are now 1-dimensional ACU clad "warriors" at home and abroad. This contributes to a misguided sense of moral agency in the servicemember and creates a rift between the military and civil-society ... this "pitch" appeals to very few.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed. We need to create a psychic break between "war" and "home." A two-season field uniform like the USMC has would be a good start as would increased use of Class Bs for CONUS personnel. Better would be if senior Army leaders toned down the phony and incessant "warrior" talk. Best would be a MINIMUM 36 month break between combat tours.
Then the appropriate control group is highly motivated individuals, with high levels of self sufficiency who don't volunteer. If they have more homicides it would certainly confirm Danziger's thesis. The obvious policy conclusion would be that the combat experience protects those at least those people against impulsive killing and we should make sure that they all have rotations through Iraq and Afghanistan.
IIRC, the Times article didn't claim that their series was comprehensive. They simply said that in some cases PTSD, in addition to several other factors, appears to have played a part in the killings. And they weren't particularly hard on the military. In the stories, some subjects were offered help for PTSD and didn't take advantage of the opportunity.
The net effect of the article may be positive if it leads some vets to get help. It might even save some lives.
Good work!
If selection bias applies, it is that military service matures men rapidly and teaches them discipline and self-control.
Oh dear. I hate to break it to you, but grown-ups deal with their own feelings, especially narcissistic ones like this. Chaplains help, too.
And just what is the Army FOR, then? The big problem with the "old" Army of the 70's was that most of the soldiers did not have any real sense of mission or what soldiering is about. If "normal" does not mean that one is either fighting or preparing to fight, then y'all are just wasting your time.
Why do they not track such information?
Frankly, I am getting tired of increasingly lower quality posts from morally and sexually inadequate elites who learn everything about the Army from the NY Times.
- - - - - - -
AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service—and How It Hurts Our Country.
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed080207c.cfm
- - - - - - -
— The Army has not been forthright in conducting this analyisis because they are afraid of the answer. I have a friend (USAR CPT w/ PhD in Epidemiology) who just finished a tour at WRAIR and he confirmed that the Army study underway to compare the # of deployments v. adverse mental health effects is seriously flawed and fails to factor in the effects on the population that for medical, criminal or administrative reasons fails to complete tours or has an adverse incident and is not redeployed.
Yes, a data point without data. (and for the record, I had a classmate at WRAIR too... studying rats)
Here is an indicator of the mental health of today's military.... better educated and more financially secure than their "peers"
- - - - - - - - - -
Post-9/11 Military Recruits Wealthier, Better Educated, Study Shows
Washington, October 31, 2006—Wartime recruits who joined the United States military in 2004 and 2005 tended to be better educated and wealthier than their civilian peers, according to a new report from The Heritage Foundation.
Economist Timothy Kane studied recruiting information to determine where service members are from, how much their families earn and what their education level is. His research follows up on a similar paper he wrote last year and shows that the trend toward better-quality recruits has actually accelerated in the years since 9/11.
This disproves the idea, expressed on Oct. 30 by Sen. John Kerry, that only those who fail in school end up in the military. “If you study hard, do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” the former presidential candidate told college students.
http://www.heritage.org/Press/NewsReleases/nr103106a.cfm
- - - - - - -- - -
Getting ready to spit on those who defend your freedom and who are superior to you.
Those figures are for the general population. If you adjusted for gender and age, you would easily find that the veterans have a lower murder rate than the group of the same gender/age in the general population.
- - - - - - - -
Military - D'uh --- because its not their jurisdiction
Justice Department --- D'uh. Because the crime rate of those in the military is in actuality lower than that of the general population.
You may not be aware of this but a criminal record is a disqualifier from VOLUNTEERING into the military requiring a waiver.
Kerry did not mean that quote to mean you'll end up in the military if you don't study, he meant if you don't study and end up as president you will make a bonehead decision like invading Iraq. Because it was politically expedient to misunderstand the (poorly thought out) quote, it was immediately misundetstood.
I think what Phil would like is that journalists act more like researchers, and try to find out if the meme they are promoting corresponds to the real world. That is far above the competence level of our current press corps.
misundetstood.
Apparently so. I misundestood it myself.
Perhaps I was confuing him with CONGRESSMAN Charles Rangel...."If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq."
How a political elite like John F Kerry, who had lectured us about "Jenjis" Khan since the '70's could fail to make himself understood is unfathomable. Perhaps its because he really wasn't that bright. Yet another reason for him to avoid denigrating military members ---AGAIN (Winter Soldier).
"Kerry's weak grades came despite years of education at some of the world's most elite prep schools, ranging from Fessenden School in Massachusetts to St. Paul's School in New Hampshire."
That is far above the competence level of our current press corps.
Agreed. Damaging to our Republic it is.
Get away from that "warrior" stuff unless you are like, REALLY being shot at?
The sad thing is, these kinds of tardvations are starkly representative of the surrender party's best and brightest (wait - where have we heard that before?) thinkers on what our military should be about.
The same school that rejects military force EVER being used if it benefits U.S. interests.
There's only so many tsunamis, hurricanes, and floods any given year... which are what the surrender party truly believes are the real reasons why anyone should have to wear an icky uniform.
Their stock price looks like a sustained ski slope down. We will not have to put up with their inept efforts much longer.
Fortunately most of their editorial stuff will have to go into some other line of work.
The point of the article is not that soldiers need help IMO. The point is to make people think the war is making our soldiers into murderers. Look at this article in the context of all the other coverage of returning soldiers. Never will you come away from a NY Times piece feeling like you've just read about a hero. He or she is always a victim/criminal.
Hmm... FBI reports crime in terms of incidents per 100,000 population per year.
So that'd be 121 per 1700 vets, or 14. That is indeed higher than the national figures, which are about half that.
But the national figures include EVERYONE. Toddlers and people on Social Security. Women (who have a much lower rate of criminality) as well as men. Homcide rates peak among the same social groups that reflect vet status (males of 18-25). So perhaps the paper could compare vets' status to that of non-vets of the same status? I'd be sure the vets come in much lower. But of course that wouldn't fit the story...
Yes, that is precisely the point. Had the Times included that, this post and this criticism would, in all likelihood, never have been written.
Also might want to consider vet suicides... but that would imply giving a shit about people and we couldn't have that in Jesus name, amen. My cousin killed himself after he got back from Vietnam and yes, it still freaking bothers me.
No.. far better to just look at all this as an attack on our glorious honor and get all defensive and whitewash the whole thing.
A friend of my killed himself his senior year at UVA and I blamed the school being too stressful. I realize now that was short-sighted and foolish. But it was a knee-jerk reaction that is natural. The NY Times manipulates this natural reaction again and again. To imagine they don't know what they're doing is to live in a dream world.
I also lost a cousin to suicide. Business and family difficulties. Without the ability to lash his pain to an anti-war/anti-America/anti-troop message, someone like him will never be thought of by the media elite. But he's dead just the same.
People kill themselves and people murder. You can study the causes and the links, but to write a story like this implying their service is the cause, is reprehensible.
"True, the Times method is shoddy. But as the reporters note, "The Pentagon does not keep track of such killings, most of which are prosecuted not by the military justice system but by civilian courts in state after state. Neither does the Justice Department."
Why do they not track such information?"
For the same reason that the Pentagon does not track births in South Dakota.
I will add your post here to the list of blogs on this subject here.
Or perhaps it could send its sons and daughters somewhere else instead of to war.
Incidentally, a commenter has decided to equate grades with intelligence. That's pretty pathetic logic.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
The antipathy towards the NYT seems churlishly ungrateful. When I click on their site every morning, I remember that they systematically lied in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. They are proud that they suppressed news of Federal invasions of privacy in order not to affect the outcome of the 2004 election. Without any consideration of the direction in which it would have affected it, of course. They just installed as a columnist the neoconservative most supportive of the Cause. Now people want to put them out of business for undermining the Volkskrieg.
If the article really encourages the idea that all returning vets are ticking time bombs, that is bad journalism. It's written in the vague, corporate press release prose they've descended to over the years, so the sensational interpretation is possible. OTOH, if it calls attention to the problem of PTSD and promotes efforts to deal with it, how is that a bad thing?
The problem with this story is context and balance - is that really so difficult to understand?
It's a 6300 word story and what do we get from it? Vets aren't getting proper screening and treatment after deployment - well Duh!
I think PC got it just right:
Yeah. Newspapers and TV stations are so reluctant to print information about homicides. Are they serious?
Deployment history is easy to check, too. The NYT obviously wasn't interested in heavy lifting.
And one would need, apparently, to lop off a quarter of the "murders" because they're actually negligent homicide, due to drunk or reckless driving. And is "involuntary manslaughter" really tantamount to Rambo-styled killing?
Stripping it done to, you know, crimes that might fit the opening paragraphs, we're perhaps dealing with all of 50 murders over a six year span.
What would be interesting to me would be to see how many of these men (all but one were men, which isn't unusual, since 91 percent of the military is male) had seen actual combat. The GySgt the reporters discuss sounds like he was part of FSSG's body scrapers.
While I have no doubt it's traumatic to sweep bodies off the MSR, it's probably not nearly so traumatic as getting to be the body. So perhaps it's a bit idiotic to look for "causation" from a service job in OIF when another motive -- known quite well over the ages -- apparely was at hand:
I should blame OIF for the man cheating on his wife with an alleged nutjob he decided to kill? The jury of his peers seems to have shared this no duh perspective, which is why he's serving life without the chance for parole.
We know from our own studies that half this many Soldiers and Marines actually see combat, which is to say that they experience someone shooting at them and they shoot back; they withstand mortar shelling, a mine, and IED, hand to hand fighting or any of the other forms of what we term "combat."
The vast majority of people deployed to OIF won't even hear a shot fired in anger. While some of this changes with CS and CSS units move outside the wire, our own research continues to show that the target group for looking at combat stress isn't nearly this large.
This isn't to say that deployments aren't stressful. SFC Halftrack is shacking up with Rucksack Rhonda, and the wife finds out about it. Wifey is spending too much and you're going to be bankrupt when you get back. Son is lashing out. Blah, blah, blah. We hear all of it, even on non-combat unescorted (and escorted) tours.
So. A pogue bored in his shop huffing ether while other men are getting shot at is a "combat casualty" when he gets back?
OK. Every year we send several thousand men and women under the age of 21 to Japan (Okinawa and mainland) and other destinations where they can legally consume alcoholic beverages. Some drink too much. Some become addicted to the substances, requiring at great expense to the taxpayer longterm treatment in military hospitals. Some will dry out and go on deployments to OIF.
Some -- get this -- leave the military after OIF and keep drinking! They even plow into people while drunk on the highway.
Blame it on OIF!
So drunk that he doesn't even know he has a gun? Blame OIF!
This is in no way an effort to discount the real suffering brought on by combat in many men. Our military medicine has proven inadequate at the task of diagnosing and treating PTSD, and small unit leaders up to battalion commanders have become much more skilled at detecing mental illness in our Soldiers and Marines, removing them from combat, and getting them the necessary treatment.
I, personally, believe that we've done a real piss-poor job overall, especially in theater, but it's getting better. Certainly, it's the best mental health care we've ever afforded any combatant in our nation, but that's not good enough.
That said, I don't know what sort of barometer 50 or so homicides in a six-year period should be. The article doesn't competently compare it to previous peacetime years using the same metrics, and
Dear NYT, no one can join the Army at the age of 16 years old. Not even with a note from your mommy. Mommy can't change 10 U.S.C., 505 (Title X).
I read a story wherein everyone was a victim, and the cause of all their troubles -- regardless of whether they saw any combat or not -- was mental illness stemming from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm now going to strap on my SAPI, borrow an M203 and reenact a scenario I've done since returning home in my previous five combat tours: I'm going to blow up the mini-mart, take some hostages, call a NYT reporter and then off a couple of cops, because we get all crazy like that and there were no parades for us!
Don't forget to huff ether, and down a lot of scotch before you go postal.
Overall, I think MSR has the gist of it.
This was expressed best by the tragic story of the Marine from Nebraska who killed a 21 year old during a moment of drunken rage.
This was expressed best by the tragic story of the Marine from Nebraska who killed a 21 year old during a moment of drunken rage.
Just for the record, my cousin Eddie was just freaking fine before he went to Vietnam, never even had time to get fucked up in the head because he was just out of high school where he had no major problems. So if you want to dwell in your Military worshipping fantasy world with the rest of the Odinists just have a great time but leave my family the fuck out of it.
I guess I'd better tell the next patient I have who is just now developing nightmares and massive guilt from his WWII or Korean service (Yup - I've taken care of them) that you think he's a pussy and it's all probably about something else because you've decided that you can't handle the threat to your cozy belief system that PTSD from combat is real.
Right. So why write and publish a story, headlined, "Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles" billed as Part 1 of a series "about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home."?
If you're taking that approach, you can't easily say, "Oh, no, you misunderstand. What I'm really talking about is PTSD."
If you want to report on PTSD, then report on those soldiers being with PTSD symptoms discharged with a 'pre-existing condition.' Or the paucity of treatment modes for PTSD patients after they leave the service. Or the difficult in obtaining psych counseling in small towns and rural areas that are far from big city VA medical centers.
Excuse me. I had a really bad day at Ft. Sill 38 years ago, so think I'll pop some pills and kill someone.
It would not surprise me in the least if this were just some sort of stealth campaign for the new _Rambo_ film. Sort of like how the History/Discovery channels went all Templars/Da Vinci when that movie came out.
The top story on al Jazeera is the visit of France's Sarkozy to the Middle East (what's it with world leaders going to Arabia in January? Duty free shopping in UAE?). Al Jazeera actually doesn't mention his pregnant mega-hot lover, but rather his second stop (KSA) where he pledged to help with "peaceful nuclear energy" production and asked for help in resolving the Lebanese crisis.
I hereby suggest that in the future we consider "Lebanese crisis" as redundant.
In its Iraq coverage, al J reported that the American-led Coalition had killed 60 armed insurgents and detained another 193 in the north (Diyalah). A suicide bomber blew up his house in Baghdad, taking seven cops (and wounding seven innocents) along with him.
The significance of the sevens probably means something when broadcasted.
At rival al Arabiya the top stories -- Bush meets with KSA leaders in Riyadh (pictured with King Abdullah), Sarkozy speaks to Shura Council in KSA (where he sucked up to the Saudis and yet managed to suggest that "truth" wills itself out, and that KSA needs to be a force for both moderation and modernity), and another story about KSA's Ministry of the Interior reaching out to start community police agencies.
The idea is to foster security in every residential community in the Kingdom by putting cops there. They'll be there to solve crimes, but also to combat "harmful habits" (which I take to mean women wanting to vote or drive, kids smooching and adult men asking for democracy). There is some question in the story whether this latter "legitimate" role -- served for years by the Virtue and Vice guys -- is going to be usurped by the new community oriented policing.
To change things up I thought I'd give everyone a sense of the news in some of the smallish countries in the region.
First, Yemen. The top story in al-Motamar (I'm doing this phonetically), is this fascinating blurb about the fact that the Secretary General of the People's Conference will host a meeting today to discuss all that might happen in the provinces in Yemen this year (issues, proposed regulations), and this will lead to consultations with local leaders in all the governing districts...
Sorry, I dozed off there.
Not to be outdone by KSA's announcement of a new COPs program, Yemen's Dr. Tahir determined to eradicate all crime in the nation!
He's the leader of an international penal reform group for the Middle East and North Africa. He gabbed with several members of the Yemeni bureaucracy, including the chairperson of the Motherhood and Childhood Supreme Council (quite a title).
This makes sense because his best ideas involve reforming the (non-existent) juvenile criminal justice system in the region. A pilot program is considered for two provinces.
Seems like a decent bloke.
What went unsaid was the huge riot in Aden that everyone else in the region is talking about. Four dead (including a policeman), 16 wounded, sparked when separatists, democracy advocates, socialists, et al, took to the streets.
Meanwhile, in Oman the big news is King Sayyid (al Said) meeting with the foreign secretary of India (jealous of France and the US but couldn't get an appointment like everyone else in Riyadh?). The foreign secretary said that the Sultanate and the Sultan and the Sultan's family had been blessed by Allah and that relations were going quite well and...
Sorry, dozed off again.
Meanwhile, in Bahrain, the airline announced the purchase of $6 billion worth of Boeing aircraft (there's the goofy picture of two stewardesses, one in a veil, acting like bookmarks to the men signing the deal); updates some European soccer news ; and the PM handed over the keys to a new housing development (51 houses have been built or rebuilt since 2005 and the PM gave the owners their keys).
Friendly Hashemites.
Bahrain, which is eyed covetously by Iran (just as it was during the days of the Shah, and before him), is very interested in US promises to protect the Gulf kingdoms, including KSA, Qatar and UAE. The Arabic-language press in Bahrain, however, tends to play this down, except when it doesn't.
Apparently, Bush addressed the Iranian people and told them to await the day when the government in Tehran believes in freedom, justice and the "family" of nations. Sounds better in Arabic.
Bush ALWAYS sounds better in Arabic. I don't know why. I suspect his handlers hand out translations of his comments in very fine Arabic. My theory is that he's going to be known as a great orator in the Arab world by the time he leaves office.
In UAE, the lead story is Bush in, well, UAE. The story has a who's who of whom Bush discussed whatever he discussed (I gave up on the story after the third leaders was named because UAE is a tribal joint and everyone must be noted).
There's also some grumbling about Bush's peace deal with the Israelis/Palestinians -- UAE believes that it puts Israel's security over the rights of Palestinians. Like most Arab-language newspapers, al-Khaleej puts the Israeli government in Tel Aviv ("Tel Aviv said...") when it's quite obvious that the decree came from Jerusalem.
According to the article, the Israeli government ("in Tel Aviv") said that 1,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza over the past two years. The newspaper didn't disclose how many Israelis had died, or that the nation had actually vacated Gaza to the Gazans.
There is some Palestinian Authority concern that Bush is trying to prod Israel and the Palestinians to accept a "three state solution" that includes "Tel Aviv" (Jerusalem), the West Bank and Gaza as separate entities (which is pretty much what they are now).
I'll agree to that!
If you ever had an original thought it would give you PTSD.
How does a NYT possibly wrong use of statistics when it comes to crimes within the veteran community equal that there is no problem with the healthcare given to PTSD victims? Do veterans have to kill their quota first, before the problem is handled properly? Im inclined to agree with the gist of PA NCOs point that the macho-attitude of the US military might be your greatest enemy in the long run. By poohpoohing the problems , you do youself a huge disfavour.
Anyway, the interesting statistical facts are the curves. Are there significantly more crime now among veterns than it used to be? And why doesnt someone keep count and analyse that data? Saying that PTSD is a real problem does not equate to calling veterans psycho-killers.
ISTM one can, at the same time, condemn this particular article and acknowledge that PTSD is a huge issue. The point I would (charitably) make is that the NYT did not do a very good job addressing that issue. Again, 6300 word article with perhaps a couple hundred of them actually on PTSD!
I, for one, wouldn't doubt that there is some causation in some of the cases mentioned in the NYT. But is it a pattern of conduct, even for this small sampling?
I don't see it in the story, and I think I'm on record as saying that military medicine has done a piss poor job at diagnosing and treating mental health issues during and after combat deployments.
It's been more than six years since 9/11 (have we tracked the
murderersvictims of the jet explosion who left the Pentagon that day and started holding up every liquor store in Arlington?). After six years and several hundred thousand deployment years (in manpower terms) for OIF and OEF and we have, what, maybe 10 (probably less) Rambo-type slayings every year?Is that indicative of anything? I don't know. The article certainly didn't sell that.
And as a medical profession, you know that researchers continue to have a hard time linking wartime trauma to PTSD and later criminal involvement. In general, it's been determined that premilitary experiences and behavior exert the largest effects on postmilitary antisocial behavior and that PTSD acts as a mediational, transitional condition but not necessarily the cause of antisocial behavior.
This, so far, is what the longitudinal studies have reported, although there remains a great deal of work to be done.
The NYT anecdote about a young man who experienced brain trauma is NOT the same thing as PTSD. As you know, this form of direct brain trauma can have a profound effect on the victim's capacity to restrain from violent acts (or any other act).
This has been well documented -- especially studies about injury to the pre-frontal lobe -- in ways that less intrusive forms of mental (not physical) trauma have not.
Antisocials as a whole tend to have LOWER arousal and responsivity than other populations, there is a small cohort that reacts quite differently. Typically, this research has focused on victims of childhood abuse who turn to delinquency, but other scientists have looked at spousal abusers. $$
The problem continues to be that those with assaultive behavior show high scores for antisocial personality to begin with, and PTSD is really just tacked on (and the PTSD cohort tend to show more emotional abuse, not physical misconduct such as homicide).
This isn't to say that some studies haven't shown some correlation between experiencing mental trauma and then becoming antisocial $$, but rather that it's far from settled because the longitudinal studies haven't replicated these findings, and often come to different conclusions.
I think what you're groping at is simple: There have been studies (Steiner, et al) that point to a very small number of individuals diagnosed with PTSD doing bad things when exposed to mental trauma. What has NOT been settled is whether there are certain people predisposed to antisocial behavior when triggered by this sort of trauma. While we know that there is a strong correlation between the amount of combat one sees and incidences of PTSD, there isn't a corresponding match between PTSD and antisocial behavior.
Had the NYT taken a look at increased suicide rates and PTSD diagnoses, they would have been on firmer ground (but I guess CBS already did that one, and not exactly all that well).
Typically, we have to deal with comorbidity when sussing out causation for violent offenders. $$
You know that. I think what you're trying to tell everyone is that they shouldn't disregard combat traumata and reacclimation stessors as comorbid causes of antisocial, violent behavior in some veterans.
But that's quite different from swallowing the NYT's story, which mixes all sorts of physical and mental trauma (including what appears to be frontal lobe injury), PTSD, some quite different conditions from the DSM and violent misconduct.
Since the actual count of homicidal behavior is likely less than 50 active duty military personnel (with unverified combat histories) over a six-year span. I'd bet it's probably even less than that, and that co-morbidity would suggest that these transgressors themselves probably had anti-social characteristics and childhood trauma before they ever set foot in OIF or OEF, and that as the studies continue to tell us, these shared causes probably were more predictive of future violence than anything else.
The "macho attitude" wins wars against real enemies of our democracy.
If you want an effete tea sipping circle, join the local book club. The job of combatants is to close with and destroy bad guys. This requires a certain temperament, one that we must fight human nature to create, typically by making sure the individual remembers that he is dutybound to his group.
If making sure that you do your job so that your buddy lives is "macho," then may we have the most "macho" military in the world.
I'm not sure how many marriages Rambo had, but he would've ranked high on the other Hare assessment criteria.
slurcaricaturepersonify an entire generation of men and yet when he was asked to be PVT John Rambo found a job teaching gym at at Swiss academy for girls?Marion Morrison
John Waynedidn't serve. Sly Stallone didn't serve. Cary Grant didn't serve.I wonder what Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart (DFC), Charles Bronson, George C. Scott, Lee Marvin, Tyrone Power and a generation of actors diverted to battle thought about 'em.
Hell, Henry Fonda ENLISTED and served on a destroyer, saying he didn't "want to be in a fake war in a studio." Got a PUC and a Bronze Star w/V.
Based upon the NYTimes exhaustive study of their own bias, in which they proved that stories exaggerating the violent tendencies of American Servicement are increasing in number, the NYTimes has proven... their own bias.
Regarding your report from Bahraini new sources, Iran has historically claimed Bahrain for centuries, as part of its historical possession and claim for the entire Persian Gulf. A majority of Bahrainis are Shia and many are of actual Iranian descent, even Farsi speaking.
The press does what it does; it is also a handy whipping boy for various and sundry interests. I don't give a shit about the press. I've been called "baby killer" and worse. I got over it.
I believe that the Army Staff does track crimes by soldiers. In the national military command center, the MP liason is supposed to brief the Army chief of staff every morning on soldiers arrested, etc, over the past day. So the Army Staff has the raw data.
Whether they compile that raw data into a database of use to the NYT, that's a different story.
Ya, well I'd suggest that the evidence of experienced commanders who were defeated by their own over-reaching aggression and / or wishful thinking and /or lack of caution and / or inattention to routine matters such as logistics, security, and reconnaissance (etc) probably applies with even greater force to amateurs like George Bush than it does to experienced commanders, not that his unfitness for his job changes the fact that it is his job.
This is a major accomplishment that has mystified our allies in the UK, who had long prided themselves on their "institutional" expertise at COIN and yet who now must concede that our efforts in very bad places have been more successful than theirs in Basra.
Laymen seem to misunderstand how difficult it is to move a very large institution to enact any changes, much less on-the-fly transformations during a war.
This couldn't have been accomplished if "macho" meant "stupid." As I've always told my troops, from the days when I was an enlisted team leader to today, "quiet pride," not arrogance.
If "quiet pride" is akin to "macho," then so be it. We stand convicted. I personally believe the US Army and USMC have a great deal to be proud about during a transformation to a COIN model since 2006.
It's not perfect. The wars in OIF and OEF are far from over. But no one with any experience with militaries could look at the US Army in Iraq today and the one in only, say, early 2006 and not see a huge difference in the ways they operate.
More than "macho," what you typically will find in servicemen and women is a pride in their small unit and their own contributions to a mission. If you notice CPT Carter's blog entries, he tends to have a great deal of concern about the mission, but no small amount of pride in the way his Soldiers performed in OIF.
That's not "macho." It's "quiet pride."
MSR,
You're missing the point here. I know what you mean about "quiet pride" in tight, cohesive combat arms units. Got it. I experienced that during my time in a light infantry battalion in the 10th Mountain.
The problem is that what is much-needed "quiet pride" in the small unit context comes across as uncaring, ineffectual, "macho" nonsense at the macro level. I've addressed this time and again.
While our small units and combat leaders must project a certain ethos, the train jumps the track when folks in senior positions start swaggering around the Beltway, Walter Reed, NDU and Recruiting Command with the bravado of a "stud" infantry battalion Commander. It degrades the EARNED bravado of the battalion commander, heaps false and obsequious praise on the poseurs by civilians and makes the Army look like a bunch of dunderheads when it clumsily interacts with civil-society.
I served with a number of great light infantry leaders who effortlessly transitioned between the beltway (Congressional Fellow, IN COL Assignments officer, USMA professor, etc.) and tactical infantry battalion command. They understood that what "worked" to succeed/inspire downrange or in a TOE unit was different from the skills (social, political, intellectual) needed to "suceed" working with the civilians and the media.
The problem here which I decry and fnord observes, is the grafting of a "kick ass", "take no prisoners" persona by persons in statseide positions that require tact, nuance and constant 360 degree evaluation - different from tactical command (which also requires these traits but in a different way).
I could go on for hours about this stuff: The LT Whiteside fiasco at WRAMC, the ACU 24-7-365 nonsense, the ruthless effort of senior Army leaders to portray everyone in the Army as single-minded, pixel-clad "warriors."
When will you admit that when our stateside, 3 and 4 star Generals try to mimic genuinely "badass" Lt. Cols the Army "loses" something - not the least of which is clear-eyed analysis?
Ya, well I'm not confused about the difference, but failure is failure, what is or isn't effective depends on what you are trying to do, and a pointless operation that's well-executed is still pointless.
Then show me the causation that ties the so-called "macho attitude" of the US military -- even its leaders -- to an inability to articulate COIN tactics in OIF.
I don't see it. Quite the opposite, obviously, because TRADOC/1st Army, USLC, et al, all the way down to the team level somehow managed to reconceive battle doctrine, retrain hundreds of thousands of combatants, rework their logistics and redeploy them thousands of miles away to fight a very different kind of war in less than a year.
It took a few broken eggs to make the omelet, and many of the so-called "macho" commanders you have railed against are gone because they couldn't get the job done. In their places have come men like GEN Petraeus who might be one arrogant SOB but he sure knows how to fight a war, doesn't he?
What I'm suggesting is that we have a problem with causation here. Obviously what Fnord identifies as "macho" (and seemingly isn't based on any real experience with US combat units or their commanders but rather pop cultural TV or film caricatures of them) has NOT been a detriment to prosecuting the war in OIF.
A "macho" Army and USMC doesn't concede mistakes, institutes reforms and then returns to the fight better for it. A "macho" Army and USMC doesn't do after actions that expose failures. A "macho" Army and USMC doesn't have Yinglings and Batemans and others constantly harping about its inadequacies, even if there are "macho" blowhards at every rank in every bureaucracy in every part of the world.
I have argued elsewhere that while you might despise the "warrior culture" as it has been applied to AMEDD and other commands, it's saved the ass of our combat arms battalions consistently redeployed, shot up and strained by two wars on the other side of the world.
A lot of it might be pure hockum. But it's hockum that means something to the institutional culture that buttresses those small units in combat.
No one mentioned your family before you did - did they?
We do a lot to train our young men what to do, from how to salute to what to do in battle. We wind them up, but fail to unwind them on the other side. Part of the problem is we are not enlisting mature men but young immature teenagers.
There is a big difference between some one who has done several years at west point, is older, more mature and had classes in the morals of war and peace, and some young teenager who is still too young to even legally walked not a bar and had a beer with friends.
We wind them up and are suprized when a few of them go off.
I think most of the posts above are attacking the messenger and in a state of high hubris fail to get the message. We are failing to look after our men. Failing to re-integrate them into normal life with the skills they need.
We have failed before. Vietnam vets still make up a very large portion of our current homless population. Ask any person who works with homless services.
Maybe not all men who go to war will fire a gun, but every one of them gets basic rifle training. Maybe not all the boys who return from war need counseling and retraining but that does not mean we should not screen them, train them and follow up to see if they are ok.
And, again, unfortunately our peer-reviewed longitudinal studies have NOT buttressed this contention. Please see links to the appropriate non-military research above.
Had the article sought to tie PTSD to suicides, or PTSD to verbal abouse of spouses and girlfriends, the peer-reviewed literature might have helped out.
As it stands now, the baseline estimate of perhaps 10 non-negligent homicides per annum since 2001 can't be considered a significant indicator of the problems the NYT details, and especially so when we don't know the deployment/combat histories of the accused transgressors and without any conception of the co-morbidity involved in their individula antisocial behavior.
If we try to bring in a larger sample size that could indicate antisocial behavior manifested in the ranks -- such as the numbers of courts martial -- and peg that to the increase in the active duty force (by "growing" the ground forces and, more important, activating Reserve and National Guard troops), we actually find a LOWER rate of criminal charges.
This is partially -- but not completely -- due to the fact that about a tenth of the uniformed military is deployed globally at any given time, but even accounting for that crime statistics within our own records is NOT bearing out the thesis that there is increasing antisocial behavior caused by the combat deployments.
What I think no researcher denies is that for a very small number of the adult, male uniformed population, traumatic events can trigger future antisocial behavior. We know this to be true, but we have to be careful with causation because the longitudinal studies continue to show that the major factors typically are NOT due to PTSD diagnoses, et al, but rather to factors imported into a military career, such as childhood physical or emotion abuse.
And this becomes a question of balance: Does "part I" of the NYT's "study" unfairly caricature hundreds of thousands of returning veterans by failing to understand the relevant research?
I think it does. I say this as someone who nevertheless believes that AMEDD and the larger military and VA largely have failed the individual Soldiers returing from OIF and OEF in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues.
I don't know why you are inserting "COIN-speak" in this debate. That's not really the topic of this thread. The diversion to point out a hard earned success paid for in blood leaves me cold. Kind of like yesterday's revisionist op-ed by Bill Kristol. Sure we may be turning a corner, but it took a year with the highest # of KIAs in OIF to get there. The topic(s) as I see it are:
1) A spike in the number of stateside murders, homicides and voluntary/involuntary manslaughters committed by serving uniformed personnel - despite lower number of soldiers and marines stationed stateside during OIF/OEF.
2) The impact on mental health and personality (if any) that repeated deployments to a COIN/assymetric fight have on a junior enlisted force that is increasingly drawn from less-educated, less-physically fit and less resillient strata of society.
3) What is this the harbinger of (if anything) for the future of our ground forces as we see an 89% increase in these incidents in our active force with an entering cohort of progressively lower quality and no end in sight for OPTEMPO or PERSTEMPO?
My concerns, outlined above and drowned out by shills for Blackfive and Grayhawk, involve the following: WTF are our senior "warrior" leaders doing to reintegrate the real returning warriors at the squad, platoon and company level to civil-society, their families and an Army that must retain full spectrum capabilities?
Battlemind may be a great program, but it has to be followed up with actions - namely - that you are back home. Great. We tell soldiers in Battlemeind that there are "no enemies at home" while we parade them around in the same desert boots they wore in Iraq and do our damnest to portray them as a thin green line protecting Mom, Apple Pie and all that's good an holy from the hordes espousing Islamofascism.
This is where my incessant and, at times annoying broadsides against the "warrior" hokum come from. It is my belief that we are failing and possibly harming those young people asked to do repetitive tours without the lens of experience, maturity or conscience held by our 30-something NCOs and officers.
When do the returning EMs of today get to "downcycle" with this OPTEMPO and PERSTEMPO? They return to a 12 month frenxy to redeploy again to Iraq or A'stan. Everything is pixelated. There is no mental or psychic cues that stateside is "different." This is something that we even had in OIF 1 and 2 with the transition from DCU back to BDU at home station. A visual and sensory cue that we were home.
You act as if this is the first time the American Army ever engaged in a war. The problem is that we are failing to learn from the past and some senior leaders (e.g. LTG Jack Stultz of the Army Reserve) are trying their hardest to break from the past and redefine the American soldier as some type of nomadic, expeditionary "warrior" untethered to American society and not subject to societal norms of professional appearance, good groom and waiting in line with everybody else at the airport chenckpoint.
Open your eyes and recognize what we are doing and HOW our leadership is projecting an image of the American soldier to civil-society, our allies and the world. There is no "normal". The increasing use of soldiers for thinly veiled agit-prop in CONUS troubles me.
Quite honestly, the only time some of our KIA junior enlisted in 2008 ever get to put on their Class As and EARNED Blue Cord is in a box at the Dover morgue. They graduate BCT/OSUT/AIT in ACUs, come home that way on leave and have their official photos taken that way. This is a problem ... even if I'm the only one who sees it.
I did not. Fnord suggested that the same "macho" attitude that makes DoD and VA such a-holes to brain addled veterans is the same temperament that kept us from "learning the lessons" of COIN in OIF.
This is BS. First, it's BS because we obviously rapidly reinstituted transformative doctrinal, logistical and training methods in a very short period of time and applied them on the COIN battlefield in OIF, so where was the "macho" blockage that kept us from doing that?
Second, it's BS because I don't believe there's much of a "macho" attitude in the US military, although I would agree that pop-cultural manifestations of this mood are evident in Rambo movies, et al.
But a movie doesn't mean reality. Quite the opposite, too often.
And to be fair, junior enlisted routinely are required to put out their Blue Cords for pointless inspections we force on them to make sure they haven't grown too fat, have all the ribbons and medals in their record books and want to change up the training cycle to get them out of the field, especially in winter.
If you're complaining about the sped up PERSTEMPO/OPTEMPO, the growing gap between civil and military cultures and anything else so complex that we have RAND on retainer to give us long and boring studies about the problems, I don't know what to tell you. Obviously, those issues go beyond perceptions by Norwegians of how "macho" American servicemen appear in the press and pop culture.
If you're further concerned about the lack of "normal" in CONUS, guess what? We are AT WAR. Maybe America isn't at war, but the ground components of the US Army and USMC most certainly are at war. This isn't "normal," although during times of conflict cultural notions you find disturbing become commonplace because, again, WE ARE AT WAR.
Actually, you kind of have to be careful with that. Due to widespread activations of ArNG and Reserve units, much of OIF and OEF have seen MORE people stationed stateside in active formations.
We've simply brought more people into the military by activating them, increasing modestly the size of the ground component and, in