MILITARY SUICIDES

The number of military suicide is continues to grow.

Trying to address is it is going to be verrrry difficult. The complexities are not only deep but certain to be politically uncomfortable for one or another ‘viewpoint’ or interest group.

Of course, the Standard Operating Procedure that has evolved here in the past few decades is to simply pick the most politically advantageous position, cherry-pick only the factoids that will support it and make it look reasonable, and then enforce Political Correctness to prevent further discussion of the possibly large and essential elements that were left out in order to achieve what passes for ‘consensus’ and policy now.

This has been a plague throughout Our civic life for decades now, and its consequences – those evil turkeys of Truth – are coming home to roost.

But the military setting promises a particularly acute forum: there are things the military has to deal with – warfighting and its consequences – that cannot be spun or repressed or wished or theorized away.

A Thanksgiving Day newspaper article skims the surfaces, but to the practiced eye of a reader who is willing to borrow the skills of the old Soviet readers of news, the awful outlines start to loom up with a little more clarity than most folks – and certainly ‘interests’ – would probably like to see.

The key difficulty is this: how do you as the military show more sympathy for “mentally fragile” and “emotionally frail” soldiers without undermining the entire military valorization of the ‘soldierly qualities’.

In this regard you might consult the most recent Star Trek movie for a rather concise Vulcan assessment of the matter: the young Commander Spock is indicting the cocky cadet James T. Kirk for undermining a key Starfleet Academy command-problem scenario. The objective of the scenario-test, Spock reminds everybody, is to confront a potential commanding officer with a literally hopeless situation, in which there are no good outcomes, in order to test and develop the cadet’s ability to simultaneously confront hoplelessness and probable death squarely, while simultaneously maintaining his self-control and emotional discipline and determination in order to maintain command of himself and his crew so that the mission, however it is to end, will be carried out – for better or for worse – with discipline.

Discipline among a crew and an officer corps, it is clearly implied, depends on self-discipline – and every crewmember has to have some ability in that regard, and the officers and the commanding officer most of all.

This is true of military affairs – at least where the rubber meets the road in combat, if not in the bureaucratic and organizational ‘office’ world of the rear-echelon and higher-echelon (Pentagon and Beltway most of all) sub-worlds of the military world.

You can see right off the bat that the military has a problem, given the way American society and culture has been heading these past decades. A ‘consumerist’ culture has always been a dangerous rival to the military ethos: giving yourself what you want right now is hell-and-gone from self-denial, postponement of gratification, sacrifice of self (not just through death but in a host of smaller self-denials) for a larger purpose and responsibility, and all the other similar requirements for soldiering. (Which, by the by, are many of the classical indicators of what used to be called ‘maturity’ and even ‘character’ before those concepts, starting in the later Sixties, were taken off the road and put up on blocks.)

Mussolini saw the Americans as “a mongrel nation”, and more to the point both Hitler and the Japanese saw Americans as ‘soft’ because of their many comparative ‘luxuries’. In the event, let’s not be fooled, the Japanese and German soldiery (and the Russian, Our allies at the time) proved formidably self-disciplined and capable of sustaining and undergoing monstrous terrors and deprivations. Americans were able to rise to the occasion, but their national industrial and technological capacities were available to close the gap in soldierly qualities.

I mean no disrespect to the Greatest Generation, but pound for pound their Japanese and German opponents were at an advantage: they had been raised from childhood by militarist governments who formed them precisely for their military roles. And I’m not suggesting that this country should embrace a militarist government in order to make sure that its kids are the world’s most formidable individual soldiers.

Still, the blessings of consumerist capitalism do exact a price.

And in the past few decades, the country has trended strongly toward a more self-indulgent or self-sensitive approach to child-raising. And as aforementioned, ‘maturity’ and ‘character’ have been pretty much retired for all practical purposes. Certain strands of feminisim and victimism and even Identity Politics have contributed largely to this, and not by accident but rather by design: their objectives from the get-go have been to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘devalorize’ so-called ‘macho and male characteristics’ in favor of a ‘sensitivity’ and an acute and brassy awareness of one’s preferences, desires, hurts, feelings, preferences and dislikes that cannot but undermine a whole lot of stuff vital not only to a certain maturity but also to the very quality of the youth upon whom the military must rely. (So you can see why bringing in recruits from other cultures and nationalities has been increasing – as in the later Roman Empire.)

And the valorizing of ‘youth’ since the Sixties has contributed as well: the young are not automatically born with access to their highest and most mature potentials and must be shepherded carefully in those formative but vitally deficient years before the most complex and uniquely human parts of the brain reach their full biological development.

And the addled effort to ‘feminize’ the military – demanded as a political expedient by the Beltway – have proven a multiple-warhead danger to the entire military ethos and the capacity to make the rubber meet the road and keep it there when combat is required.

In the first place, the military ethos has been assaulted with gleeful and arrogant zeal by feministicals who are happy to claim that “it’s not your father’s or your grandfather’s (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force – fill in the blank) anymore”.

Worse, that the types of officers required for those ‘old’ wars aren’t required any longer. Although, of course, the ship, plane or combat gadgetry has not yet been invented that will not require officers of competence and deep maturity – and troops will always need leadership (including non-commissioned officers). So the idea of a non-combat military is a political pipedream; and imposing it upon the military has been something not so very far in effect from outright insanity if not treachery.

Worse, the concomitant stratagem of greasing the skids for all this by claiming that the military is primarily an ‘employment opportunity’ (or ‘right’) has had monstrously corrosive effects on the military’s and the public’s sense of just what the frak it is all about and what it’s there for.

The military is not just another corporate employment opportunity like IBM or General Motors (used to be). It is – even more than the local domestic emergency services like fire and police – an organization that must be ready on short-notice to draw upon deep skills of self-discipline (individually and organizationally) in order to sustain the most demanding combat missions. And in Fourth-Generation Warfare (a Fifth seems to be in the offing) the combat challenges are even more stressing and frakulous than in the bad old days of WW2 and Korea, or even Vietnam (and upon all those dead be peace).

Nor has it helped that the national leadership – from both Right and Left – has gotten Us involved in the most incorrigible and refractory ‘wars’, and ones that promise – for lack of any clear enemy and the lack of any overall strategic objectives – to last for years, decades, and possibly generations. Generations of Fourth and Fifth Generation Warfare are going to demand a whole lotta maturity and self-discipline from the troops and their officers ‘in theater’ (and from the products of the Service Academies, and from the ROTC programs and from American society itself).

And these national developments (emphasis on the ‘de-‘) have affected psychology and clinical practice as well. I have written about ‘stress’ and ‘stress in the military setting’, here most recently. Mainstream psychology has had a difficult enough time with ‘stress’ in the civilian setting, but in the military setting the problem assumes exponentially more difficult proportions.


You might for a moment wonder if all this interconnection of seemingly unrelated trends can really have burned together in the national woodland to create such a specific and frakulous wildfire. I recall Rory Stewart, for a while a UK Foreign Service honcho in the Southwest Asia theater, mentioning in a 2006 book* that he could only marvel at “the pomposity of his American bosses, who in the safety of their secure headquarters plan to create ‘a multi-ethnic, decentralized state, based on human rights, a just constitution, a vibrant civil society, and the rule of law’ as if they were constructing a new shopping mall rather than dealing with a 5,000 year-old civilization”.** Funny, funny, funny that the Pentagon has started to try the same type of ‘culture wars’ that have so profoundly corroded the American domestic scene for decades. But hardly a coincidence.

In order to maintain a certain group-sense and group-support of the soldierly qualities, especially among hordes of youth, there is an unavoidable ‘valorization’ of emotional as well as physical strength (also something devalorized by the feministicals) and of the ability to ‘suck it up’ and keep focused not on your fears, pains, and problems, but rather on the mission. (Though I am not here implicitly approving the frakkery of the missions that have been assigned to the troops by the Beltway of late.)

As any high-school athletic coach could (or until recently could) tell you, it’s pretty much a given that the kids – trying to keep themselves on their best ‘edge’ – aren’t going to have much patience with those who are having trouble keeping it together on the field. This may sound ‘insensitive’ but I don’t intend it that way; if your first reaction on reading it is one of distaste or disapproval, I suggest that such a first-impression is an indicator of just how things have changed in the country in the past few decades.

So now We are seeing a military – for decades trying to de-macho itself in response to intense political pressure and the general trend of American society – desperately trying to keep its troops on their best edge in order to sustain at least some respectable level of combat competence and capability while trying to ‘valorize’ or at least not be insensitive to those who cannot – for whatever reason – handle the intense pressures.

This is a problem of the most awful complexity, and there can be no easy solutions. If you make it ‘easy’ on those who can’t handle the pressure, you run the risk of undermining those who are making every effort to try to hold themselves together and keep things going. On the other hand, you can’t simply submit the ‘emotionally fragile’ to ongoing opprobrium and fail to provide some level of services. On another hand, you can tie up an awful lot of resources trying to adequately provide such services. (Military medicine’s costly re-jiggering to provide the politically requisite amount of medical, let alone psychological, services to female troops is a story that has not yet received adequate notice.)

And on another hand, given the type of frakkery inherent in Fourth Generation War you are going to have emotional and psychological problems with even your most dedicated troops. And all of this is exponentially intensified if the troops generally start to get the idea that they have been committed to another Vietnam, or something close enough to it.

The neat but criminally witless Fundamentalist solution – if you just believe God works through the US government and ‘the powers that be’ then your ‘faith’ is all the ‘help’ you need – is probably starting to lose steam with the departure of Bush the Egregious, but after 25 years of Fundamentalist Ascendancy in the military (since 1987 and Reagan’s second administration at least) there’s still a lot of that going around.

So you see the problems.

And this is even before the parents, relatives, and advocates of military suicides and the “emotionally fragile” military members speak their piece.

To try to make a gesture such as giving “equal honors for survivors of military suicides” in military funerals is going to create as many morale problems among the troops as it ‘solves’ among the parents, families, and friends of the deceased. There is difficulty enough with the development (in the Canadian fashion) of special medals for those who ‘thought’ or ‘felt’ they were under attack by the enemy and suffered physical or emotional or mental ‘wounds’ as a result.

Should the President send a letter of condolence to the immediate survivors of military suicides as is done for those killed in action? Again, what effect will it have on the military members still trying to keep themselves going? And what effect will it have on the expectations of potential recruits whom the military will need to sign up? It is already heavily influenced by recruits who signed up in the sure and certain knowledge that military service was merely an ‘employment opportunity’ and a ‘right’ not much more complicated than deserving a drivers license – and then they got deployed … into a Fourth Generation War.

How do you maintain the vital and indispensable appreciation for self-discipline and a certain emotional toughness and resilience, while also demonstrating from the highest levels on down that ‘frailty’ is ‘OK’?

This is a turkey from Hell, come home to roost from the early days of the military’s truckling to the feministical demands that it re-make itself into a feministical-friendly employment-opportunity organization while officially and formally maintaining its insistence that such ‘changes’ would not, and do not, and could not adversely affect morale and operational competence.

As with credit-cards, it was all a great time … until the bill came due.

And so it has.

NOTES

*Stewart, Rory. “Occupational Hazards”: Picador, 2006.

**For that matter, I recall a Buddhist leader, Shunryu Suzuki, commenting decades ago on the 1960s-1970s fad of setting up an American Buddhism; he opined that trying to transplant Buddhism “is like holding a plant to a rock and waiting for it to take root”.

ADDENDUM

Having said all that, let me broach a topic that’s even less PC. Again, I’m not insensitive here, but when you’re looking at stuff that has to be looked at clearly even though it’s not PC, you’re going to have to ruffle the feathers too quickly smoothed by PC proprieties.

In all of this military stress stuff, there’s the ‘moral hazard’ element as well.

You have seen the phrase ‘moral hazard’ before: it means a policy’s effect (intended or unintended) of creating what used to be called a ‘temptation’ to game the system.

You’ve seen it applied in reference to the subprime mortgage crisis. The high-living financial ‘wizards’ (more like cheap conjurers) were unregulated and that non-regulation created a moral hazard for them. And it appears they fell right into that temptation.

The poor or impecunious, offered unbelievable deals with seemingly limitless credit for mortgages, also rode right into the valley of the Little Bighorn.

In all matters of the ‘stress’ diagnosis, there is also a moral hazard. Since the diagnosis is kind of fuzzy, it’s not hard to claim stress and there’s no real way that your claim can be verified by an observer or evaluator. It’s built into the whole ‘stress’ diagnosis: you claim a) to be under pressure and b) as a result of such-and-such an experience.

Now it’s possible that your reported ‘stress’ is purely ‘emotional’ and its ‘pain’ ditto – in which case there’s no way for an independent observer – one trained but still ‘outside of’ you – can examine that for validity. Yes, perhaps your ‘stress’ is causing some clearly verifiable medical or psychological problems; high-blood pressure or some such. But ‘nightmares’ can’t be independently confirmed, nor can ‘behaviors’ that – alas, given human nature – can be mimicked or staged.

But on top of that, (b) is verrrry hard to establish: so that even if an evaluator can decide that Yes, you ‘have stress’, s/he can almost never conclusively connect (a) to (b), can almost never conclusively say that your ‘stress’ is a result of such-and-such an ‘experience’.

That’s been the trouble with all ‘stress’ and PTSD diagnosis, even in the civilian sector: establishing the link between (a) and (b).

And then on top of that, ‘stress’ has been expanded from its original context of PTSD resulting from (mostly) Vietnam-War-experience to ‘stress’ and ‘trauma’ caused by various gender and sex issues and – at this point – by just about anything at all.

Now, even worse, how can you 'cure' such 'stress'? Because 'victimism' (a noxious brew comprised of the quiet political alliance of radical feminism and law-and-order Rightism), forbids suggesting that an individual is somehow responsible for his/her well-being or self-managment or self-improvement - to say such a thing would be 'blaming the victim'. So what options are left to you as a care-provider? Drugs, cash payments, government health care that promises to burn eternally because the 'therapy' can never reach the 'source' of the problem? Such a deal.

And it’s been like this now for at least two decades.

Now imagine this problem as it manifests in the current military situation. Generations of youngsters (and not so young), raised to be acutely alert to any unpleasant stimulus that may ‘stress’ them, are now put not only into military life (which in its day-to-day Stateside form has become sort of average-corporate employment with a dress code) but put into combat, and Fourth Generation War combat at that, and on top of it all, a losing war (or two).

Now military life and one’s military ‘commitment’ and ‘responsibility’ become not only an unpleasant stimulus, but potentially very dangerous as well.

There is – is there not? – a rather significant possibility that less-than-robust troops will be tempted to declare themselves ‘stressed’.

Thus commanders are once again over a terrible barrel: to respond to all ‘stress’ reports as if they were unquestionably valid is going to quickly have two dangerous results: i) significant fractions of troops (perhaps increasing fractions) are now unavailable for operations and ii) troops trying to keep up their responsibilities see how easy it is to get out of them.

This is NOT to imply that all ‘stress’ issues are ‘fake’. But there is precious little way to officially and conclusively distinguish the ‘genuine’ cases from the – ummmm – ‘moral hazard’ cases.

Add that the predominant default position in the country for the past few decades has been to ‘believe the pain’, and the military commander is put into an almost impossible position.

And like so many of combat’s consequences, these are problems that cannot simply be ‘spun’ or ‘re-visualized’ away. It’s no longer a matter of ‘reframing’ a ‘text’ or merely ‘changing an attitude’; these are real, intractable, demanding problems that require real solutions (not the Beltway’s preferred mode of action these past few decades, alas).

MILITARY SUICIDES

MORE REAL DOTS

Associated Press reports that Harvard, U/Michigan, and a couple of other schools are going to be studying the military suicide rate, now the highest in American history.

I’m all for studying things. What are the frontal lobe capacities for if not for learning useful and factual information upon which We might base serious and maturely-reached decisions affecting untold numbers of human lives?

But that’s not guaranteed here.

After all, there are all sorts of factors that most very probably contribute to this monstrous problem but that cannot be discussed because many ‘elites’ – Hahvahd not the least among them – in universities and the Beltway created the very factors that have now burned together into a lethal synergy.

Yes, of course, the egregious frak Bush and his posse actually cooked up this war (now several wars). I’m not spending time on this point because it’s been rather widely put out there.
I’m interested in the hidden factors that cannot be discussed because they were created and imposed by the so-called (but hardly) ‘liberal’ elites. As Alberto Gonzales could not have thought up on his own the idea that the Constitution had become “quaint”, so too Bush & Co. only built upon the conditions handed to them by the Clinton years and much of the Democratic record of the past several decades.

The Bushisti took to heart Madeleine Albright’s observation (which she got from Hitler and possibly channeled through the Israelis): “What’s this great military for if not to use it?” Yeeeeeeee-hawwwww! Lit’s git soldierin’! Where oh where was Rhett Butler when We really could have used him, standing in the middle of an elite cocktail party and saying – over a cigar, if I recall rightly – that chest-pounding doesn’t win wars and ‘we don’t have what it takes to win this if we start it’. Rhett, Rhett, we hardly knew ye … oy.

In the first place, for decades now, the hard and serious realities of the adult world have been downplayed in a concerted push to make America kindler, gentler, and more child-friendly. Which somehow worked out – starting with the Boomers – into assuming that ‘the kids’ actually know more about life and living than the grown-ups do. (The Boomers were impressionable, film and TV-soaked youngsters when Jim Backus’s feckless dad was unable to do anything to help James Dean’s cute but angst-ridden son in “Rebel Without A Cause” in 1955.)

Ideological Feminism’s assault on ‘male’ and ‘macho’ wound up going after ‘serious’, ‘mature’, ‘careful’, ‘rational’ and ‘deliberate’ for good measure. ‘Thoughtful’ ceased to be a synonym for ‘rational’ and instead meant that you sent the appropriate card and flowers when occasion demanded. ‘Mature’ know meant over-the-hill, fuddy-duddy, stick-in-the-mud, obstructionist, and was proof positive that you just don’t get it.

Cohorts and then generations of kids were raised either without fathers or with fathers whose masculinity was constantly impugned by the media and even by the national legislature, supported by all sorts of legal impositions approved by the courts. The government – and then the President – became the functional replacement for God, responsible for making everybody feel ‘safe’ and even ‘happy’. Nor did the government – unwilling to piss off moist-eyed voters – want to retain God’s traditional insistence on ‘sinfulness’ that makes this world – and thus human life and human affairs and human history – an actual Vale of Tears for which one must prepare oneself.

Medications, junk food, and all sorts of distractions, diversions, and substitutes for actual accomplishment were slathered onto the young like a too-sugary frosting on a badly-baked cake.
Education became less concerned with teaching facts and how to think (there was no ‘reality’ anyway, only ‘perception’, so ‘thinking’ was not only ‘masculine’ and ‘elitist’ but also useless – thus brayed the elites). Instead, the satisfaction of mastery – even of the self – was replaced by the lathering on of ‘self-esteem’, as if that hugely valuable quantum was merely a commodity that could be given to a child like any other ‘gift’.

In the military, this emphasis on being ‘nice’ had particularly lethal effects. Of course, ‘war’ was now a thing of the past in any sense that implied violent, sustained contact with other human beings who sustained a competent resistance against you. So, it was said by the oh-so-confident ‘elites’, America could afford to lose a 20-percent loss of combat effectiveness because no other country in the world (the USSR was on its very last legs) could stand up against Us.

Recruits were now prepared for ‘careers’, even at the Service academies. The objective of military training was not to achieve a mastery over oneself – body, mind, emotions, and spirit – so as to be able to sustain effective combat operations and bring them to a successful conclusion. Instead it was to provide a ‘fulfilling work experience’; the goal of training was to provide a sense of satisfaction, not to achieve actual mastery of the self so as to master the battlefield.

Standards went by the boards. ‘Failure’ was too awful to inflict on kids, and they should be protected from it. Strictness, firm adherence to objective standards that measured and graded performance … these were part of the ‘macho’ military that had to go. The plan was to “reduce greatly the influence of white, male attitudes in the military”. Recruits were given little cards that – when waved – forced drill instructors to stop applying what little pressure was still permitted so that little Rufus or Muffy could have a nice ‘time out’. Sigh.

Things progressed rapidly. Congress and the Executive, after all, had their eye on voters, and women and children (could 17 year-olds somehow be allowed to vote?) were the most important demographics to be kept happy.

Did it require three or four ‘mixed gender’ sailors to do the task of two males? So what? We can afford it and they won’t be in harm’s way anyway. Did it take five female firefighters to crew a crash-truck that required only four males? So what? We can afford it, and how often do military aircraft crash anyway? Do we have to redesign the bolt of the basic infantry rifle so females can draw it? So what? We can afford it – and anyway, when will they ever really have to use the things?

Where grizzled military veterans insisted on preparing troops and sailors for the awfulness of a combat that had never yet been banished from human history, the cadres of Correctness overruled them or got them booted from the armed forces. Nobody got anywhere in the military unless they were ready to do kinder-and-gentler. It was a replay – in no small way – of Stalin’s purge of the officer corps in the mid-‘30s, which did not turn out so well for millions of hapless Russian troops when Barbarossa came a-calling in June of 1941.

Don’t misinterpret this. I hold war to be hell and I further hold that no human being simply comes back from sustained combat ‘the better for it’. It was not for nothing that the early Church required all Christians returning from military service to undergo a period of restorative repentance: those ‘quaint’ ancient folk rightly figured out that soldiering requires the doing of awful things, and if you survived you probably had done them better than your beaten and deceased adversaries. Repentant reflection – within the support of a coherent believing community – was undeniably called for if you were to ever be able to re-organize yourself and conduct a civilian life again.

But to send – and they now truly are – ‘mere babes’ into the maw of sustained combat is a form of youth-abuse that leaves Our recent brouhahas over ‘abuse’ in the dust.

So it’s a frak-up from hell now.

Females who were assured that they were equal to the challenge if they just ‘perceived’ themselves to be are now subjected to a Fourth-Generation War (rapidly evolving into a Fifth) that chews up anything and anyone not internally strong enough to withstand its myriad assaults on the human self.

And such internal, characterological incompleteness is hardly limited to females. Generations of young, un-fathered males are equally at a loss.

And what capable buckaroos actually do get to the field therefore have to carry the weight of sizable bunches of characterologically-insufficient unit-mates. Which burns them out at an incredible rate.

They keep saying We have 150,000 troops over there. Perhaps, in actuality, We have far far fewer.

And, getting back to the subject, suicides are reducing those numbers. And there are no doubt many times the number of actual suicides who have simply put up their little card and told Life and War that they don’t want to play anymore and want a ‘time out’.

Can anyone seriously think that all this hasn’t monstrously degraded Our military capacity?
And that’s even before you get down to the serious matters of strategy and tactics, not excluding Our increasing entanglement in ‘the graveyard of empires’, which most recently chewed up the Red Army in its own backyard. The Commies joined a long line of trophy heads-on-pikes that goes back to Alexander.

And We think that We’re going to do better?

And We expect these kids to do better? After what they have been deprived of in the name of Political Correctness for the past several decades?

Let Us not be so quick to laugh at those among Us who hold their lives together in the sure and certain belief that the earth is 6,000-some-odd years old, and that Adam had a pet dinosaur in the Garden of Eden or shortly thereafter. (An eerie echo of Fred Flintstone, no?)

We seem to be of the opinion that you can bathe children in some sort of permanent replay of early childhood, and expect them to hit the deck running when adulthood and reality start to trumpet their war-calls.

And, like the later Roman Empire, We find the solution in bringing in non-citizen mercenaries who were raised in less ‘civilized’, less Correct places, where a day’s work was the alternative to starving and where blood and sweat and tears weren’t just the name of some old band your parents liked.

Can it be any wonder that on top of the frustrations of a failing imperial occupation in the face of wily resistance, troops are falling to the pressures of sustaining a self that can metabolize such unpasteurized buckets of bloody reality?

And what senior commanders are left now – after the culling of the last decades – who will stand up for their troops?

We are the Red Army in 1941. Only without the vast reserves of scruffy but solid kiddoes who can handle the job if just given the tools. And maybe without any truly competent major commanders like Zhukov.

And let Us also take to heart Stalin’s shrewd observation: American money will take us only so far, comrades.

It’s one of the few things about which We can agree with him.

NOTE

You might want to read one or both of the following books. 1) Stephanie Gutman: ‘The Kindler, Gentler Military’: New York, Scribner – 2000. 2) Brian Mitchell: ‘Women in the Military – Flirting With Disaster’: Washington, D.C., Regnery – 1998.