How Can We Stop the Epidemic of Killing Women and Children By Returning Soldiers

By Ann Jones, Tomdispatch.com. Originally Posted on AlterNet

April 6, 2009.

No society that sends its men abroad for war can expect them to come home and be at peace, as returning Iraqi vets are proving in alarming numbers.

 

Wake up, America. The boys are coming home, and they’re not the boys who went away.

On New Year’s Day, the New York Times welcomed the advent of 2009 by reporting that, since returning from Iraq, nine members of the Fort Carson, Colorado, Fourth Brigade Combat team had been charged with homicide. Five of the murders they were responsible for took place in 2008 when, in addition, “charges of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault” at the base rose sharply. Some of the murder victims were chosen at random; four were fellow soldiers — all men. Three were wives or girlfriends.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Men sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for two, three, or four tours of duty return to wives who find them “changed” and children they barely know. Tens of thousands return to inadequate, underfunded veterans’ services with appalling physical injuries, crippling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suck-it-up sergeants who hold to the belief that no good soldier seeks help. That, by the way, is a mighty convenient belief for the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, which have been notoriously slow to offer much of that help.

Recently Republican Senator John Cornyn from Texas, a state with 15 major military bases, noted that as many as one in five U.S. veterans is expected to suffer from at least one “invisible wound” of war, if not a combination of them, “including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and mild traumatic brain injury.” Left untreated, such wounds can become very visible: witness, for example, the recent wave of suicides that have swept through the military, at least 128 in 2008, and 24 in January 2009 alone.

To judge by past wars, a lot of returning veterans will do themselves a lot of damage drinking and drugging. Many will wind up in prison for drug use or criminal offenses that might have been minor if the offenders hadn’t been carrying guns they learned to rely on in the service. And a shocking number of those veterans will bring the violence of war home to their wives and children.

That’s no accident. The U.S. military is a macho club, proud of its long tradition of misogyny, and not about to give it up. One decorated veteran of the first Gulf War, who credited the army with teaching him to repress his emotions, described his basic training as “long, exhausting marches” and “sound-offs [that] revolved around killing and mutilating the enemy or violent sex with women.” (The two themes easily merge.) That veteran was Timothy McVeigh, the unrepentant Oklahoma City bomber, who must have known that blowing up a government office building during business hours was sure to kill a whole lot of women.

Even in the best of times, the incidence of violence against women is much higher in the military than among civilians. After war, it’s naturally worse — as with those combat team members at Fort. In 2005, one of them, Pfc. Stephen Sherwood, returned from Iraq and fatally shot his wife, then himself. In September 2008, Pvt. John Needham, who received a medical discharge after a failed suicide attempt, beat his girlfriend to death. In October 2008, Spc. Robert H. Marko raped and murdered Judilianna Lawrence, a developmentally disabled teenager he met online. Carson

These murders of wives and girlfriends — crimes the Bureau of Justice Statistics labels “intimate homicides” — were hardly the first. In fact, the first veterans of George Bush’s wars returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from Afghanistan in 2002.

On June 11, 2002, Sgt. First Class Rigoberto Nieves fatally shot his wife Teresa and then himself in their bedroom. On June 29th, Sgt. William Wright strangled his wife Jennifer and buried her body in the woods. On July 9th, Sgt. Ramon Griffin stabbed his estranged wife Marilyn 50 times or more and set her house on fire. On July 19th, Sgt. First Class Brandon Floyd of Delta Force, the antiterrorism unit of the Special Forces, shot his wife Andrea and then killed himself. At least three of the murdered wives had been seeking separation or divorce.

When a New York Times reporter asked a master sergeant in the Special Forces to comment on these events, he responded: “S.F.’s [Special Forces members] don’t like to talk about emotional stuff. We are Type A people who just blow things like that off…”

The killings at Fort didn’t stop there. In February 2005, Army Special Forces trainee Richard Corcoran shot and wounded his estranged wife Michele and another soldier, then killed himself. He became the tenth fatality in a lengthening list of domestic violence deaths at Fort. Bragg Bragg

In February 2008, the Times reported finding “more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or [fatal] child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans” since the Afghan War began in October 2001. And it’s still going on.

The Pentagon: Conveniently Clueless

In April 2000, after three soldiers stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, murdered their wives and CBS TV’s “60 Minutes” broke a story on those deaths, the Pentagon established a task force on domestic violence. After three years of careful work, the task force reported its findings and recommendations to Congress on March 20, 2003, the day the United States invaded Iraq. Members of the House Armed Services Committee kept rushing from the hearing room, where testimony on the report was underway, to see how the brand new war was coming along.

What the task force discovered was that soldiers rarely faced any consequences for beating or raping their wives. (Girlfriends didn’t even count.) In fact, soldiers were regularly sheltered on military bases from civilian orders of protection and criminal arrest warrants. The military, in short, did a much better job of protecting servicemen from punishment than protecting their wives from harm.

Years later the military seems as much in denial as ever. It has, for instance, established “anger management” classes, long known to be useless when it comes to men who assault their wives. Batterers already manage their anger very well — and very selectively — to intimidate wives and girlfriends; rarely do they take it out on a senior officer or other figure of authority. It’s the punch line to an old joke: the angry man goes home to kick his dog, or more likely, his wife.

Anger may fire the shot, but misogyny determines the target. A sense of male superiority, and the habitual disrespect for women that goes with it, make many men feel entitled to control the lesser lives of women — and dogs. Even Hollywood gets the connection: in Paul Haggis’s stark film on the consequences of the Iraq War, In the Valley of Elah, a returned vet drowns the family dog in the bathtub — a rehearsal for drowning his wife.

The military does evaluate the mental health of soldiers. Three times it evaluated the mental health of Robert H. Marko (the Fort Carson infantryman who raped and murdered a girl), and each time declared him fit for combat, even though his record noted his belief that, on his twenty-first birthday, he would be transformed into the “Black Raptor,” half-man, half-dinosaur.

In February 2008, after the ninth homicide at Fort, the Army launched an inquiry there too. The general in charge said investigators were “looking for a trend, something that happened through [the murderers’] life cycle that might have contributed to this.” A former captain and Army prosecutor at Fort asked, “Where is this aggression coming from?… Was it something in Iraq?” Carson Carson

What Are We Fighting For?

Our women soldiers are a different story. The Department of Defense still contends that women serve only “in support of” U.S. operations, but in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “support” and “combat” often amount to the same thing. Between September 11, 2001, and mid-2008, 193,400 women were deployed “in support of” U.S. combat operations. In Iraq alone, 97 were killed and 585 wounded.

Like their male counterparts, thousands of women soldiers return from Afghanistan and Iraq afflicted with PTSD. Their “invisible wounds,” however, are invariably made more complex by the conditions under which they serve. Although they train with other women, they are often deployed only with men. In the field they are routinely harassed and raped by their fellow soldiers and by officers who can destroy their careers if they protest.

On March 17, 2009, the Pentagon reported 2,923 cases of sexual assault in the past year in the U.S. military, including a 25% increase in assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, assaults committed by men who serve under the same flag. What’s more, the Pentagon estimated that perhaps 80% of such rapes go unreported.

And then, when women come home as veterans, they, like their male counterparts, may be involved in domestic homicides. Unlike the men, however, they are usually not the killers, but the victims.

Shortly after Sgt. William Edwards and his wife, Sgt. Erin Edwards, returned to Fort Hood, Texas, in 2004 from separate missions in Iraq, he assaulted her. She moved off base, sent her two children to stay with her mother, brought charges against her husband, got an order of protection, and received assurances from her husband’s commanders that they would prevent him from leaving the base without an accompanying officer.

She even arranged for a transfer to a base in New York. However, on July 22, 2004, before she could leave the area, William Edwards skipped his anger management class, left the base by himself, drove to Erin Edwards’s house, and after a struggle, shot her in the head, then turned the gun on himself.

The police detective in charge of the investigation told reporters, “I believe that had he been confined to base and had that confinement been monitored, she would not be dead at his hands.” Base commanders excused themselves, saying they hadn’t known Erin Edwards was “afraid” of her husband. Even if true, since when is that a standard of military discipline? William Edwards had assaulted a fellow soldier. Normally, that would be some kind of crime — unless, of course, the victim was just a wife.

Back in North Carolina, near Fort Bragg and the nearby Marine base at Camp Lejeune, military men murdered four military women in nine months between December 2007 and September 2008. Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, eight months pregnant, went missing from Camp Lejeune in December 2007, not long before she was to testify that a fellow Marine, Cpl. Cesar Laurean, had raped her. In January, investigators found her burned body in a shallow grave in Laurean’s backyard. By then, he had fled to Mexico, his native country, and been apprehended there; but Mexico does not extradite citizens subject to capital punishment.

On June 21st, the decomposing body of Spc. Megan Touma, seven months pregnant, was found in a motel room near Fort Bragg. In July, Sgt. Edgar Patino, a married man and the father of Touma’s child, was arrested and charged with her murder.

On July 10th, Army 2nd Lt. Holly Wimunc, a nurse, failed to appear for work at Fort Bragg. Neighbors reported that her apartment was burning. Days later, her charred body was found near Camp Lejeune. She had been in the process of divorcing her estranged husband, Marine Cpl. John Wimunc, and had a restraining order against him. He and his friend Lance Cpl. Kyle Ryan Alden were charged with murder, arson, and felony conspiracy.

On September 30th, Army Sgt. Christina Smith was walking with her husband Sgt. Richard Smith in their Fayetteville neighborhood near Fort Bragg when an assailant plunged a knife into her neck. Richard Smith and Pfc. Mathew Kvapil, a hired hit man, were charged with murder and conspiracy.

Striking about these “intimate homicides” is their lack of intimacy. They tend to be planned and carried out with the kind of ruthless calculation that would go into any military plan of attack. Most were designed to eliminate an inconveniently pregnant lover and an unwelcome child, or to inflict the ultimate lesson on a woman about to make good her escape from a man’s control. In some of them, in good soldierly fashion, the man planning the killing was able to enlist the help of a buddy. On military websites you can read plenty of comments of comradely support for these homicidal men who so heroically “offed the bitches.”

Give Peace a Chance

The battered women’s movement once had a slogan: World peace begins at home. They thought peace could be learned by example in homes free of violence and then carried into the wider world. It was an idea first suggested in 1869 by the English political philosopher John Stuart Mill. He saw that “the subjection of women,” as he called it, engendered in the home the habits of tyranny and violence which afflicted England’s political life and corrupted its conduct abroad.

The idea seems almost quaint in competition with the brutal, dehumanizing effectiveness of two or three tours of duty in a pointless war and a little “mild” brain damage.

We had a respite for a while. For nearly a decade, starting in 1993, rates of domestic violence and wife murder went down by a few percentage points. Then in 2002, the vets started coming home.

No society that sends its men abroad to do violence can expect them to come home and be at peace. To let world peace begin at home, you have to stop making war. (Europe has largely done it.) Short of that, you have to take better care of your soldiers and the people they once knew how to love.

 

 

 

Why India is Behaving Like Lashkar e Tayyibah (LeT)?

 Azhar Aslam

 India today is considered by the world to be an established state. Indians think they are on the brink of acquiring super power status. LeT on the other hand is a banned organization considered to be a terrorist non-state actor. So why is it that the belligerence and jingoism Indian state and media is what would be expected of an organization like LeT. How come Indian state is behaving like a terrorist organization?

Non-state violent actors, until recently have been called mercenaries and have been used, by different powers throughout human  history.  British imperialism started its life in this shape and form, the most famous being the East India Company. Sir Drake , Sir Raleigh and other such “privateers,”  were all non state entrepreneurs who advanced state power. Lawless violence often preceded the rule of law.

More recently after the Second World War United States has employed several non-state forces in various parts of the world to further its foreign policy agenda, often at high human and economic cost to that country and its people. Ironically Afghanistan was one such theatre. The Indian support for Baluchistan insurgency is an open secret. There is a strength of evidence for Indian and US support for ‘Jihadist’ groups operating on Pakistani territories.

After the recent Mumbai attacks it has been claimed by India ( serious evidence still pending) that a non state actor  LeT has infringed its territory and perpetrated lawless violence. Indian state and its leaders are now invoking this as a reason to respond in kind.  The jingoistic antipakistani stance of Indian media and politicians is being built to hysterical levels. There have been calls to respond in ‘manner of United States’.

It is most disturbing that Indian government instead of behaving in a lawful manner befitting the largest country in the region, has tried its fullest to take ”advantage” of human misery in its own country and of its own people and made this a ‘Pakistan-centric’ event. When it should have been paying attention to healing its own wounds, India has seen it as an opportunity to salt these wounds and create fresh ones. And here the state has been led by hysterical media. That tells volume about the structural stability and framework of Indian institutions claimed to represent world’s largest democracy.

Indian state wants to behave like private bullies, justifying violence, revenge and torture just like non-state terrorists. As Arjvind Rajgopal has put it ‘War has become the preferred means of practicing politics under the guise of opposing terrorism, and it is endorsed as a sacred duty’.

 India seems to be following in USSR tradition and trying to create an aura of invincibility for its own ego satisfaction without considering the hundreds of millions of its citizens who are hungry, poor and destitute. Is the death of nearly 250 people, mayhem for a few days in one city, a little hurt ego more important than the teeming masses who linger in poverty. Should India not be concentrating its efforts on spending money for creating infrastructure for its own; of education, health, transport, economic opportunities.  Is it worth a war?

 

Common sense answer is ‘No’. So Why is it that certain parts of Indian media/intellectuals/politicians triumvirate, want India to respond in an American manner? Our analysis leads us to two reasons.

 

First, Indian leaders and intellectuals suffer from severe inferiority complex and generational anger lingering on from British Raj days. For all the talk of rising power of India and Indians taking over the world India is desperate to declare itself as a super power one way or another. Look closely at the pattern of Indian media’s coverage. It was not designed for Indian masses. It was designed to be fed to the international audience, in particular US and UK citizens, whose gullibility has no limits. And it is seems India has decided that its response to Mumbai attack, (which by the way was smaller in number of casualties compared to 1993 or 2006 or Gujrat, just to quote few examples) is going to declare to the world that it has turned into a regional or world super power.

 

India has this complex about being ‘Like America’. This is no more than a sign of serious inferiority complex and insecurity of its own identity. The most obvious sign of this inferiority complex is that the event is described as India’s 9/11, with enemy intruders committing murder and mayhem. “9/11″ has become a nationalizing mantra across the globe, an invocation to remember violence in order to garner consent for violent retaliation.

 

No one has even considered that what the world has turned into after the American response. It is not as if the world has become a safer or better place that this response should be imitated. The signs of being super in power are maturity and sagacity. It is to reach out and stand against terrorism of any kind and take other (in this case smaller) countries in the region with her. It is to lead. But has India done any of it? No sir. So forget about being super in power. India needs to set its own  house in order.

 

This brings us to the second reason behind India’s jingoistic stance. It is related to the long standing failure of Indian state. It has failed in three important respects. First, it has failed its own secularism and failed to forge an Indian nation; second it has failed its own poor in pure economic terms; and thirdly it has failed its Indianness in its eagerness to ape the west. 

Not withstanding show boys of Indian Muslims (from Abul Kalam Azaad to  M J Akbar)  there is  the increasing discrimination in civil society and the media against Muslims.  Indian state continually fails to provide justice to its minorities and masses. Then there are Dalits, Chrsitians, Bhuddists, Tamils, Naxalites. The list goes on. I quote Gopal again:’ Muslims in India have, for some time, been treated as internal enemies, through a combination of covert and overt socio-economic boycotts, state discrimination, episodes of intense political violence, and anti-terror legislation granting judicial powers to police.’

And what is Indian response to all this. For Kashmir, it blames Pakistan; for the seven sister states Bangladesh is the culprit and China takes the blame for the Naxalite insurrection. India has been in a state of perpetual war due to its ego, border disputes with all its neighbours and misplaced priorities.

Then there are pure economic issues. Here again Indian leaders ego complexes have led to failure of its own people. This failure is villainous in part and negligent to criminal extent. It is multifold and multilayered. While ‘India is shining’ for an elite minority, the masses and the land is being opened up for a new form of colonialism for Bharati and multinationals corporations, in the name of reforms and progress.

 What Indians have failed to grasp or at least have shown no capacity to put any such understanding into context is that they are seen as no more than a big economic market opportunity for western nations and corporations, due to sheer numbers. Research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) shows that within a generation, the country will become a nation of upwardly mobile middle-class households, consuming goods ranging from high-end cars to designer clothing. In two decades the country will surpass Germany as the world’s fifth largest consumer market. It is this which attracts West; not some attitudinal shift in Anglo-Saxon thinking. If they are under any illusion that suddenly Westerns have started seeing them as equal partners, all they have to do is to sit in few pubs across middle England. That shall be more than sufficient to clear such delusions of grandeur.

Consequently in the name of progress, poor are marginalized. Cities suffer from severe economic and social segregation. The slums for the poor are demolished  and ghettos moved around. Muslim and Dalits  in India are overwhelmingly concentrated in such ghettos  and, in episodes of Hindu nationalist violence, have been the principal victims of assaults. It is not India shining. It is Bollywood shining and like tinsel town it is more razz matazz than substance .   The Justice Sachar Committee, in 2006, reported that ‘the condition of Muslims had deteriorated to such a point that they were worse off than the untouchable caste, which has traditionally occupied the lowest rung of Indian society’. In some cases, Muslims are ostracized to the point of social death.

And for all the talk of famed reforms by the present Indian Prime Minister in early 1990s, when he was a finance minister, it was more a case of India being at the right place at the right time by sheer luck than any planned strategic goal achievement. Indian progress owes much to certain historical events converging fortuitously at the right time.  The collapse of USSR forced India into balance payment crisis, forcing Rao and Singh’s hand to deliver economic reforms where by Licence Raj was ended. At about the same time seeds of globalization were being sown while West was recovering form the recessions of early 1990s. The scores of English speaking graduates of IIT were now suddenly available at cheap labour adding impetus to Indian preeminence as outsourced markets. Western corporations were looking for cutting their costs and they started outsourcing. Indian diaspora played its part. Manufacturing was outsourced to China and IT services to India.  Subsequently ore reforms followed and FDI increased as western corporations themselves sought a slice of the market.

This brings us to the third Indian failure. The fact is that Indian  middle class is fast losing its ‘Desi’ values and the South Asian culture is being undermined by the still persistent and widely prevalent ‘Ghulam Zehniat’. For all the slogans of ‘new super power’, ‘largest democracy’, ‘big and powerful country’ etc, the Indianness is fast ebbing away.

Most middle class Indians feel more proud to speak, act and live and display the consumerist western lifestyle than any indigenous South Asian, Indian or Baharti lifestyle. Their tastes are indistinguishable from those of prosperous young Westerners – high-end luxury cars, designer clothes, maids and full-time cooks, and regular vacations,  abroad.

 One sign of this is the elites in Mumbai assuming that they too must respond “like America’’ and asking where their Rudy Giuliani was ? The irony is that the sign of being developed and civilized in India is no longer the welfare of its general masses in economic and social terms but ‘ State terrorism and war’.  

Like Pakistan Television is being watched increasingly in India and nearly two thirds of the population has now access to television.  And it is very profitable.  Consequently there is intense competition in news sector and live TV. Many of 24 hour channels are owned by transnational media corporations. And Like Pakistan a disproportionate number of prime time viewers tune into news channels (perhaps due to the age old Sub continental taste for politics).  Consequently this was the first attack that was being telecast and watched live. It seems that even the planners of these attacks knew this and planned to take full advantage of the global audience on offer. The death of V P Singh and eight people in Tamil Nadu rains from 26 to 29^th November went nearly unmentioned. To quote ‘They died unmourned and even unmentioned on the explosive screens that kept millions enthralled’.

As some Indian pundits have asked that while media fixated on ‘who’ and ‘how’ for these attacks, ‘why’ was completely ignored. It is the media which seems to be leading the response of Indian State rather than the other way round. In other words, the corporate agendas of the media owners has dictated the response of Indian rulers and Indian state.  The proof of sympathy to the upwardly mobile middle class urbanites it seems is war with Pakistan at the cost of teeming poor and destitute billions. As Gopal points out that the  ‘the media in India is only nominally public. …it is elite who own the space and dictate the terms of its discourse. In the recent attacks hardly any attention was paid to the railway station where sixty people were killed. TV crews stayed focused on the luxury hotels, where “People Like Us” were affected.’ To quote J S Raman ‘The elite of Mumbai and elsewhere, mourning the fall of the elegant Taj, have been trying to sound tougher than even the politicians of the Parivar (the Far Right “family”).’

 

We thus see that these three fundamental failures of Indian State that have either incapacitated the senses of Indian State and its rulers and they are being unwillingly led by the media or they have simply become complicit in the dangerous egocentric brinksmanship regardless of the cost to people of Subcontinent.  That the complex to ‘be big’ and ‘super power’ is fuelling this on cannot be doubted. But the world is watching. And India must take a note. The very status it craves for more than anything else is under threat due to its childish and amateurish actions.  The more it acts like ‘Non-State’ actor the more it risks its status in the comity of nations.