WAR, WOMEN, AND STORY

Well, Sara Corbett has an article originally in “The New York Times Magazine” but also on Truthout (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031807C.shtml) . Again, it is a story about the war-and-horror stories of women in the war. It’s 19 pages long and I go at this subject again since Corbett has raised some interesting material, and because this entire women-in-mixed-gender units and women-in-war thing is not only wreaking its own damage, but clearly connects with other national issues and problems (the Iraq misadventure among them) by which we are presently bethump’d.

The primary story is about one Suzanne Swift and her mother, a social worker. The mother had originally penned an article dealt with in an earlier Post ("Facts on the Ground" http://chezodysseus.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html). In short: Swift, member of a back-from-Iraq MP unit, age 21, was apprehended by local police while “painting her toenails with her sister” after several months on the lam from her redeploying unit. She was facing charges for AWOL from this Iraq-bound unit when she claimed that she had done it because of the pressures of war and because she had been ‘sexually harassed’ throughout her history of service, as a consequence of which she was suffering, she claimed, from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Corbett defines PTSD as “a highly debilitating condition brought on by an abnormal amount of stress”. Its symptoms, she goes on to note, can include depression, insomnia, or “feeling constantly threatened”, quoting from the current edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the official guide for mental-health professionals in establishing diagnoses.

Various points arise as one proceeds through the text of the article.

This ‘stress’ diagnosis represents a very significant change not only in the practice of psychology in this country but in American society itself. It came about after Vietnam when soldiers experienced ‘flashbacks’ and assorted symptoms prompted by particularly difficult things they had seen, experienced, or – less frequently mentioned – done while in Vietnam. It was a useful diagnosis for a certain extreme reaction to combat, and was seen by professionals at the time of its formal adoption as a modern upgrading of the long-recognized condition of former combat soldiers (“soldier’s heart” it was called after the Civil War).

But things never happen in a vacuum in life or in society. There was in the late-60s a certain approach to psychology, influenced by theorists such as Foucault, that saw medical and psychological diagnosis as a form of societal and hierarchical oppression; in its wilder forms it actually posited that the ‘insane’ were actually the ‘sane’ and vice-versa (in the later 1970s a variant of this approach, still hanging around, would help ‘advocates’ convince state legislators to largely empty the old state mental facilities, turning loose upon the public great numbers of former inmates who – while thus ‘liberated’ and ‘empowered’ – instantly became ‘homeless’).

The ‘empowerment’ of the patient blended as well with the feminist consciousness-raising of ‘sensitivity’ and its emphasis away from the (masculine) objective to the kinder and gentler subjective approach to life: it wasn’t a matter of what ‘is’, it was a matter of what one ‘feels’ (I’m painting with a broad brush here, but you get the idea).

Suddenly, the PTSD diagnosis, born in what was by the mid-1970s a distant past indeed, exploded into public awareness: the newly empowered patients insisted that they, not the doctor (so often in those days a male), had the right to declare when they were in ‘pain’, to say what traumatized them emotionally. And there was a certain logic to it: pain is an almost entirely subjective phenomenon, only rarely traceable on medical imaging equipment (comparatively primitive back then anyway). So who would know better than the patient, the (subjective) sufferer?

This worked as long as the ideal or average patient had a high-enough pain-threshold to report only ‘serious’ emotional pain or pain arising from serious events (‘trauma’ as it once was known). But it quickly came about that there was no way to establish objective criteria for subjective ‘emotional pain’; it also quickly came about that it would be socially and cultural unacceptable (‘insensitive’) for a physician to deny any patient’s report of pain. If a patient said he or she was in great emotional pain, regardless of whether a sufficiently grave causal event could be identified, or if the patient identified as causal an event that really didn’t appear to be sufficient to cause the pain that the patient claimed to be experiencing … you as a professional were to go with the patient’s claim. Before much time had passed in American society, almost all professionals were going along to get along.

With no objective boundaries that could possibly be imposed – indeed with a cultural insistence that any attempt to impose boundaries would be ‘insensitive’ and malpractice and a ‘revictimization’ of the patient – the entire thing metastasized. Not only females – traditionally stereotyped as being more vulnerable to pain – but numerous veterans (not all from combat experience, by any means) began to report ‘pain’ and lots of it, caused by ‘trauma’ – which itself had been defined as whatever-the-patient-felt-s/he-couldn’t-comfortably-tolerate. When we think about what happened when the enforceable boundaries of Truth and objectivity were removed from ‘sex-offender’ matters, and then from government justifications for waging pre-emptive war in the Middle East, we do well to remind ourselves how it all started to take root in our culture and our society, not with a bang but with an empathetic sigh.

So – simply from a conceptual point of view – there was now a ‘diagnosis’ that allowed the patient to essentially declare him-herself thus afflicted, and there was no scientifically possible way to corroborate that claim nor did there remain any cultural ‘permission’ to even attempt to do so, let alone express doubt as to the accuracy or validity of the claim, or – the horror! – doubting the honesty of the claimant. But large amounts of bounty – financial, cultural, psychological – were available to anyone who wished to put him-herself forward. Additionally, designated ‘symptoms’ were phenomena as low-grade as ‘feeling depressed’, ‘feeling threatened’, and so many others similar thereto that so often clutter the lives, minds, and hearts of just about all of us humans.

It would not take a rocket scientist to venture an accurate guess as to what was going to happen.

Swift’s war-induced stress, Corbett relates, was caused by events pretty much endemic to soldiering: having mortar rounds dropped upon one’s position, seeing friends die – even by friendly fire, working sixteen-hour shifts. Further – and here we see the great waves loosed in our culture begin to lap back upon each other – she was propositioned by her squad leader (male) and she “felt coerced” into having a four-month sexual relationship with him. When she finally put an end to it, she was forced to march back and forth across the camp in full pack and gear and she was humiliated in front of the other soldiers. Contacted by the Army investigators, the squad leader denied any sexual contact.

Even in a reasonable world, this type of claim would be difficult. If there were witnesses or physical evidence, or even if the lower-ranking member had a record of adequate or better performance of duties, then one might at least have grounds of some sort to take action. If however the lower-ranked was not a strong performer, or was a poor performer, then such marching tours might thus be accounted for. I don’t know what Swift’s record is. But that’s the point: we have a ‘disease’ which is so functionally ephemeral that helpers are reduced to scrounging for clues in a patient’s discoverable history (not all of which, nowadays, is available or ‘reportable’, let’s recall).

It was the ‘genius’ of the feminist and later the victimist and sex-offense movements and advocates that they realized that he-said/she-said situations are far too fraught with objective weakness to often prevail; you could hardly build a ‘movement’ or a revolution on them. But it was their accomplishment that they solved this problem profoundly: by discrediting ‘fact’ and ‘objectivity’ and skeptical inquiry as modes of public or jurisprudential response to any claim. The only “politically correct” response was ‘sensitivity’ and ‘acceptance’; men were so prone to sex that they were, for all practical purposes, ‘objective enemies’ – enemies by the simple fact of their essence and their existence, on behalf of whom any indulgence would be treason to the Cause and to the masses and against whom all violence necessary was justified. Thus did Lenin come to be one of the foremost makers of modern American praxis. Thus, too, perhaps, the Unitariat came to assume that We would fall for anything if it were emotionally-packaged, and thus We came to prove the Unitariat correct. And thus Ms. Swift chose to sign up for the Army and thus she went off to Iraq.

Corbett, to her credit, acknowledges in the next paragraph that “As it often is with matters involving sex and power, the lines are a little blurry”. Naturally: cut loose from the shaping and boundarying effects of Truth and Objectivity and Reason, a ‘story’ thus untrellised can grow like kudzu. With impressive clarity but with exquisite care Corbett continues: “Swift does not say she was raped exactly, but rather manipulated into having sex repeatedly”. So far, this sounds like one of those monstrously unprovable and intuitively almost impossible things by which, through making us believe them before breakfast for years now, the relevant advocacies have degraded everybody’s ability to distinguish, or even consider it right to try to distinguish, Truth from something else. A fact that was not lost on the Unitariat.

But in the military, it’s possible to take the game to new levels. She had sex because “this soldier was above her in rank and therefore responsible for her health and safety”. As with so many other phenomena that were highly predictable from the get-go, the advocacy has come up with a sassy but mystique-laden term for this type of thing: “command rape”. Although, to be accurate, there is no rape alleged. The idea is apparently that women (even in the all-male Army era you rarely encountered troops claiming that they had submitted to sex with a sergeant because they had – for all practical purposes – mistaken him for their father or their provider) sorta are prone to do stuff like this more than guys; or – as is the preferred spin and usage nowadays – they are more ‘vulnerable’ to it.

But if that’s true, then why oh why oh why did the feminist advocacies browbeat Congress (hardly a forum for displaying the best of American male maturity) into mixed-gender units in the first place? Wouldn’t it have been better for ‘women’ to be spared all the unnecessary ‘vulnerability’ situations by putting them into all-female units? Then they could concentrate on the soldiering or the sailoring. Why are we reading these 19-page compendia of woe at all? Was this thing not entirely predictable and entirely preventable?

A skeptic might claim that the feminists knew from Day One that ‘women’ couldn’t really do the soldiering and sailoring in sufficient quantities to ground their agenda, so they had to ensure that the units were mixed gender – in the field and aboard ship – so that the guys could actually keep the mission going and the ship afloat and underway; the generals and the admirals could certainly see the upside to that. But a gambit that cynical and that massive … you can’t really accept it.

Corbett starts to draw back into the safer and more familiar ground of what she calls “the dominant narrative”: many female troops she interviewed were telling similar stories. The same skeptic could opine that once that “narrative” had become culturally “dominant” – or just widespread, through television and film and sympathetic and selective media coverage – then it would stand to reason that the “narrative” of harassment, like the diagnostic “narrative” of PTSD, would be deployed by ever-larger numbers of persons. For whatever motive and reason each individual might have in doing so.

But who knows? Who is honestly to say? The ‘revolutionary’ goal, masked in the swaddling of advocacy, is not to determine the Truth but rather to ‘make’ the ‘truth’ by eliminating all other possible explanations or even the attempt to examine claims and offer alternative explanations. Sorta like if you ‘make history’ and everyone else has to follow what you do, and you label anybody who tries to examine your ‘truth’ as ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘treasonable’. ‘Insensitive’ is the ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘un-American’ of the Left. The more things change …

Here again appears an odd number that has been appearing recently in these women-in-trouble stories over in Iraq: “So far, more than 160,000 female soldiers have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq” and “today one of every 10 soldiers in Iraq is female”. The math seems a bit odd. If we are hard-pressed to keep 160,000 troops over there, then how could there possibly be this many females? And if one out of every 10 is female … well, that seems to indicate we have a much larger army then anyone has realized. A skeptic might also observe that if even a fraction of them are making these types of claims or are in this condition … then there are more than a couple of unspoken additional reasons why we are losing the war over there. But that would be incorrect.

It is to her credit that Corbett reports on studies indicating that after the first Gulf War twice as many females as males developed PTSD – which gives food for serious thought. She also reports, but does not examine, the assertion that “women are more likely to be given diagnoses of PTSD, in some cases at twice the rate of men”.

So we are left, in this house of mirrors that the advocacies have constructed, staring at conflicting and distorted images, and no way of telling which is the ‘real’ and which are a reflection cast in a mirror. If we were dealing with ‘objective’ injuries like broken arms, we wouldn’t have this problem. If we had objective criteria for these psychological claims, we wouldn’t have this problem. But all that was jettisoned in the days before the feminist advocacies set their sights on the military, and back when they never imagined that there would ever be sustained ground combat again, let alone the shape-shifting terrors of counter-insurgency warfare in populated areas.

Are women more prone to stress? If so, is it because they are more ‘sensitive’? No matter how ‘positive’ or ‘constructive’ a spin you put on that, it’s a problem – and can armies in sustained (and losing) combat operations be required to put up with that? Bear that burden? Or is it that it’s such a subjective diagnosis to begin with that the whole disparity in numbers may just be chalked up to the doctors being chauvinist pigs who will ‘label’ a woman and not a guy or to doctors who are trying to do ‘the woman’ a favor?

It’s not just a question of which is the correct answer – it’s a life or death matter of whether any of this brouhaha is necessary at all. We are losing a pre-emptive and invasive war that we got into by falling for many of the same gambits played on us by our Unitarium that were imposed upon us by impatient and righteous advocacies in the long ago when we had cash and no real prospects of ever having to fight an old-fashioned war again.

Corbett keeps up the pace. Imagine, she proposes, how many women have been raped in civilian life (and here the reader need only refer to the ‘numbers’ and ‘knowledge’ provided by the feminists’ sub-and-sister advocacy: the sex-offender lobby). We are to imagine that there is now a class of woman-in-trouble suffering “a double whammy”: raped in civilian life and now combat-stressed in the military. I imagine that Corbett had a reason for refraining from taking it to the next level: the triple-whammy of having been raped in civilian life, combat-stressed, and having been raped (or ‘assaulted’ or ‘harassed’) in the military and – fourth level – in the military by someone who outranks them.

I do not doubt the conceptual possibilities that Corbett raises, although I add the usual sex-offense provisos about elastic definitions and unsupported ‘evidence’. Rather, I simply wonder again: Is any of this necessary? Wasn’t it all preventable by – at the very least – the institution of single-gender units?

We see here, I think, an echo of the phenomenon we are experiencing in matters Israeli: by creating from the get-go a situation that is bound to cause insoluble difficulties and then refusing to yield, one can guarantee oneself as the victim of a sempiternal ‘crisis’ on the basis of which endless demands – rendered vivid by reports real or otherwise – may be made. A case might be made, in another of these baroque and hot-irony metaphysical echoes, that decades ago the advocacies adopted the Israeli playbook and as a result the women in the Army in Iraq are now in crisis.

It’s a house of mirrors, our modern American reality, and so often it seems that we are agitatedly wrestling with pillows thrown over our heads by well-meaning but kinda ruthlessly determined advocacies. Yet out there – out where ‘others’ roam and dwell – it’s all very real, all too too real. Our troops are over there, obedient to Our word. If they are facing real bullets for Us, then We should muster the respect to face – and solve – real problems for them.