The boundaries of suffering and honor

This article in the New York Times on the Purple Heart is fascinating to me from an anthropological point-of-view. The ways that Americans are grappling conceptually with mental illness and the ways that veterans' health problems in recent wars challenge our existing categories of pain and suffering would be a fascinating dissertation topic, if I didn't already have an area of study carved out. It needs further investigation, too, in light of how shamefully neglected our veterans often are. The bureaucratic nightmares facing veterans and their families that I heard about on NPR on Veterans Day brought tears to my eyes.

It's not a novel argument for me to point out that medical advances in past decades allow many persons to survive physical injuries that would previously have killed them. How we come to terms with the person who lives on, though, and what unique needs and challenges s/he experiences, is something we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. But why must we culturally delineate those forms of suffering from the ones of those who cannot return to everyday life for other reasons? This is such a complex question, and so evocative to me of how intuitive it is for us post-Enlightenment beings to separate body from mind.

John E. Bircher III, director of public relations for the Military Order of the Purple Heart explains: “You have to had shed blood by an instrument of war at the hands of the enemy of the United States. Shedding blood is the objective.”

This New York Times article on violent offenses by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans conveys exactly the kind of human costs I knew this country wasn't prepared for when George W. Bush pushed us into this war, and I wept as I walked down the street in Austin, marveling at the futility of us 10s of thousands of anti-war protesters in the capital of his home state, railing against the inevitable. I felt embarrassed at the time, that I couldn't hold it together. Now, I think there was a kind of premonition in my reaction.

What is absurd to me is that there isn't thorough treatment for all the military personnel coming back from this war. Given the military culture, it's unreasonable to expect a questionnaire to be an adequate screening tool, and it's irresponsible to do anything less than an individual assessment for each and every person who is expected to make the transition from holding a weapon with the express purpose of causing injury and death to an enemy, to going about everyday life in a civilian world. I believe the US government bears far more responsibility in these cases than the NYT is in a position to argue. And I believe that this article is a fine illustration of how woefully underestimated the enduring costs of this war have been, and continue to be, by this regime.