Medication, Religious Re-teaching Helping Our Troops Keep Killing

To keep our troops alive and killing the armed forces are increasingly using medications to dull the pain of regret, aka depression apparently from an article in Time Magazine's "America's Medicated Army ".

Journalist Mark Thompson at Time is, of course, a professional and therefore much more expert than yours truly at dancing around a subject without really explaining what he's talking about. 

Excerpt:

He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. "You don't always know who the bad guys are," he says. "When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would."

...

questions have assumed greater urgency as more is revealed about the side effects of some mental-health medications. Last year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urged the makers of antidepressants to expand a 2004 "black box" warning that the drugs may increase the risk of suicide in children and adolescents. The agency asked for — and got — an expanded warning that included young adults ages 18 to 24, the age group at the heart of the Army. The question now is whether there is a link between the increased use of the drugs in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters and the rising suicide rate in those places. There have been 164 Army suicides in Afghanistan and Iraq from the wars' start through 2007, and the annual rate there is now double the service's 2001 rate.

 Thompson's report notes that the Nazi's in WW2 and the US in Vietnam used amphetamines (which can increase aggressiveness).  Though he makes it seem that such things are no longer done, I remember earlier there were reports of use of the same in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It always makes me wonder if something has happened to the Nexis search engine that the professionals supposedly use.  They act like previous reporting never really happened.

 "Medication can, however, alleviate some debilitating and nearly intolerable symptoms of combat and operational stress injuries" and "help restore personnel to full functioning capacity." Which means that any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the "dwell time" at home before they go back to war — it's possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. 

 Some of this is true.  Meds and 'counseling' can help keep those troops killing, and they may be needed to start off the other wars that Presidential  hopeful John McCain promises if he is elected.

But, no matter.  If the drugs don't keep the troops killing, the chaplains will help out. I heard a smaltzy report on NPR today about a 'valiant' chaplain that was able to keep an American soldier alive and killing by 'counseling' him into continued persevereance.  Yes, the military needs chaplains to re-explain that "Thou shall not kill" commandment  so their troops can do all kinds of horrendous things to the people of Iraq.  And then the meds will help cover the natural destruction of psyches of our coerced killers intact so they can keep it up.

Isn't it fun what can be done to young people?  Older people might choose for themselves to be killers or not, but young people are used to being told what to do and therefore can be rounded up to serve as killers and cannon fodder for businesses that want access to natural resources or a buyer for their war machine goods.

I am still amazed that many of us just went like cattle to Vietnam in the seventies or went to every anti-war march we could find in the sixties and earliest seventies instead of shutting the entire economy down while they were rounding some of us up and shipping us off for a war of aggression then.  This time our warmongers are focusing on reusing a small number of 'warriors' who in the end turn out even more damaged than the Vietnam veterans.

Chaplain Smaltz (not his real name), though very mindful of the young man's tenderness (never realized when he joined the military and trained that he might really be called upon to kill someone according to Smaltz's explanation) never counsels the young man to follow what would obviously would ease the guy's conscience and just say no.  Then again,  his employer is the military.

A couple of facts to remember and spread:

• We won the Cold War by pulling out and losing Vietnam.

• The USSR lost the Cold War by staying the course in Afghanistan until their economy collapsed.

• Vietnam now wants to join the WTO and has made numerous changes towards that end.

Remind your friends and relatives of these facts. 

tags: iraq  military chaplains  anti depressants  

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