They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction: Soldiers from the Wars

1. Secrets: The Dead

2. Salvage: The Wounded

3. The New Normal

4. Stateside: The Warriors

5. The Sacrificial Soldier

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

About Ann Jones

About Tom Engelhardt

Also by Ann Jones

About TomDispatch

About Dispatch Books

About Haymarket Books

Read this unsparing, scathingly direct, and gut-wrenching account—the war Washington doesn’t want you to see. Then see if you still believe that Americans ‘support the troops.’

—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

They Were Soldiers is an indispensable book about America’s current wars and the multiple ways they continue to wound not only the soldiers but their families and indeed the country itself. Ann Jones writes with passion and clarity about the tragedies other reporters avoid and evade.

—Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990

This is a painful odyssey. Ann Jones’s superb writing makes it possible to take it in without sugar coating. Her scene painting takes you there with compassion and without flinching—no sentimental bullshit here, no lofty pity. We fly with her in the belly of a C-17 medical evacuation from Bagram, into operating rooms of the Landstuhl European way station, more surgeries at Walter Reed, into the gymnasium for the long, determined work with prosthetics, with the physical and occupational therapists. We go with her to the homes of the families receiving the brain-injured and the psychologically and morally injured. We hear firsthand accounts by families of service members who died of their war wounds in the mind and spirit, after making it back in one piece…physically. Her breadth of vision includes even contractors, whom most dismiss from their minds and forget. Read this book. You will be a wiser and better citizen.

—Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD, author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming

For a decade, the independent journalist Ann Jones has, through her firsthand reporting of war and life on the ground in Afghanistan, given us more of the reality of that conflict than any dozen of her well-connected colleagues in the established media, attuned as they have been to the cant and spin pouring out of official mouths. Now, she has turned her shrewd, wise, compassionate, reality-bound eye to some of the bitterest facts of all: the almost unimaginable suffering of the American soldiers wounded and otherwise impaired in the conflict. The result is a harrowing and compelling tale that is hard to bear but must be borne if we are to understand the rolling disaster this country unleashed in Afghanistan more than a decade ago.

—Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World

© 2013 Ann Jones

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This book was published with the generous support of the Wallace Global Fund and the Lannan Foundation.

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In memory of my father

Lieutenant Oscar Trygve Slagsvol

Honored for extraordinary heroism in action while serving with 128th Infantry Regiment, 32d Division, A. E. F., near St. Gilles, France, 3 August 1918. Commanding the battalion patrols, Lieutenant Slagsvol was engaged continuously throughout the day in making reconnaissances under heavy fire. Although wounded, he preceded the battalion into the enemy’s position and continued to perform his duties until he was overcome.

In actuality, the vast majority of people on the planet awake on a typical morning and live through a violence-free day—and this experience generally continues day after day. The overwhelming majority of humanity spends an average day without inflicting any physical aggression on anyone, without being the victim of physical aggression, and in all likelihood, without even witnessing any physical aggression with their own eyes among the hundreds or thousands of people they encounter. . . . In actuality, one can travel from continent to continent and personally observe hundreds of thousands of humans interacting nonviolently. Even if searching for conflict, an observer may find people talking over their differences, ridiculing a rival, persuading or coaxing someone, and perhaps arguing . . . negotiating solutions to their disputes, agreeing to provide compensation for damages, reaching compromises, reconciling and forgiving one another, all without violence, within families and among friends, neighbors, associates, acquaintances, and strangers. . . . Additionally, time and again, individuals from various cultures simply walk away from conflict—and such widespread avoidance and toleration tend to be both invisible and considered not newsworthy.

—Douglas P. Fry, Beyond War (2007)1

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.

—Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (1936)2

Author’s Note

This book is made up largely of voices from among the hundreds of people I interviewed or talked with in the United States, Europe, and Afghanistan in the course of more than two years, and informed by what I have learned since 2002 from hundreds of others here and abroad.

Most of the people I quote in these pages spoke on the record, but I have chosen to withhold their names or change them. Most of them—especially soldiers, family members, and medical personnel—were under enormous stress at the time we talked, many near the breaking point. Some of the soldiers and medical personnel may have expressed themselves more openly or forcefully than their military superiors would approve, and as I dealt with Pentagon bureaucrats, I came to see the need to shield my informants. For that reason, I have slightly altered or left out some of the small background details readers have learned to expect: what they look like, where they come from, and so on. Trust me. You don’t need to know those things to understand what they go through and how they feel.

Many soldiers and family members who gave extended interviews requested anonymity, wishing to protect the privacy of their loved ones. I asked those participants to review my accounts before publication, and they have verified their accuracy. In one case, at their request, I have used the real names of Joyce and Kevin Lucey, parents who have become forthright public advocates for veterans.

I have invented no composite or fictional characters. All the people I mention in this book exist, or did. Their words presented as direct quotations come from my taped interviews. Paraphrased conversations and brief remarks are drawn from my copious notes. Endnotes specify when names have been changed or withheld. All other names that appear in the text and notes are real.

Another reason for not identifying most of my informants by name is that so many of them—soldiers, doctors, nurses, and therapists alike—though extremely dedicated professionals, are part of a military system in which they are no more than interchangeable parts. That impersonal system, itself merely a cog in the great American war-making machine, is the real subject of much of this book.

When it comes to soldiers who have returned Stateside, too many of them got in too much trouble too fast for me to investigate all of their activities firsthand. In that section of the book, I rely heavily on small town newspapers that dispatched their own reporters to track down the facts, and statewide, regional, and national papers that assigned investigative teams to connect the dots and reveal the bigger picture. My hat is off to unsung local journalists who are doing that work all across America, and without whom we would be in the dark.

—Ann Jones

Oslo, Norway

August 2013

Introduction

Soldiers from the Wars

Sooner or later almost every American soldier comes home—on a stretcher, in a box, in an altered state of mind. Soldiers return or fail to return to families who love them, or try to, families who recognize them, or not. Communities that help them, or can’t.

That’s what this book is about. Not the pointless wars, which have gone on for so long that historians are already weighing in with their evaluations, using words like shipwreck, disaster, tragic mistake. Historian Andrew J. Bacevich reminds us, It is the soldier who bears the burden of such folly. U.S. troops in battle dress and body armor, whom Americans profess to admire and support, pay the price.1

In this book, I don’t pretend to give anything like a complete picture of soldiers, but rather offer a series of snapshots of soldiers I met, and the people around them, the caregivers and family members and friends who look after them when things don’t go according to plan. They, too, pay the price of folly. I gathered these snapshots on military bases and in military hospitals in the United States and its war zones and in houses here at home.

They are not pretty pictures. They are what I saw—perhaps darkened by the knowledge that nothing recorded in this book had to happen. War is not natural. We have to be trained for it, soldiers and citizens alike. And the wars of choice we were trained for, the wars these soldiers took part in, need never have been fought.

Contrary to common opinion in the United States, war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention—an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind—and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don’t even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You’ll see.

What’s more, war is obsolete. Most nations don’t make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious coalition. The earth is so small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.

Why then do I write about America’s soldiers? Some might think it strange to pursue such a trail of waste and sorrow, and I would have to agree. I follow these wars as the child of a veteran, having never quite managed to escape the shadow of the war in which my father fought so very long ago. He enlisted in the Great War—World War I—because it was sold as the war to end all wars. But wars never turn out as advertised. And the word Great, by the way, is not a compliment but a reference to the size of that slaughter. My father used to say that wars are made by men who have never been to war, men who don’t know that war, once started, never ends. The Great War ended with the Armistice in 1918, but my father lived another 60 years—and that war never left his memory or his nightmares. Of the 300,000 Americans who fought in World War I, 50,000 were still hospitalized for psychiatric disorders 20 years later.2 The violence of war does not end, even when peace is declared. Often it merely recedes from public to private life.

This book, then, is not about war itself, nor even about soldiers as they are trained to see themselves and we, in turn, are taught to see and support them. It is about the damage done to soldiers, their families, their communities, and the rest of us, who for another half-century at least will pay for their care, their artificial limbs, their medications, their benefits, their funerals, and the havoc they dutifully wrought under orders around the world.

1.

Secrets: The Dead

The base stands in a shallow valley amid steep mountains on the northeastern margin of Afghanistan. It is laid out in a tidy grid behind walls of concrete and gigantic Hesco bags of steel wire mesh filled with rocks and rubble. It’s June 2010 and every morning the gate opens to release into the high stony desert a convoy of MRAPs, or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles, on patrol. Tall and top-heavy, an MRAP is apt to roll down a mountainside, leaving soldiers to crawl out and make their way back to base on foot through a landscape laced with mines and overseen by enemy snipers. Often a patrol does not end well.

One day, the base commander goes to the gate to meet vehicles returning from an ambushed patrol. The MRAPs creep slowly in and park in a row just off the main intersection—and there the soldiers sit in the vehicles until day turns nearly to dark. Other soldiers walk restlessly up and down the street, but none of them intrude upon the squad in the MRAPs, knowing they have lost a man and earned the right to sit there, still strapped in, doing whatever it is they feel they must do.

The next day I watch a sergeant mount a color photo of the newly dead soldier in a black frame. He holds it at arm’s length. A boy’s slightly blurred face, squeezed between a high dress collar and an oversized hat, looks back at us from the shadow of the brim. The sergeant says, It’s too bad it’s not a better photograph. After carefully checking the spelling of the soldier’s name, he hangs the photo on the wall in the corridor outside the base commander’s office at the end of a long row of similar photographs. Such photos, taken as a soldier’s military career begins, are on file when needed for just such occasions as this. Thousands of these photographs stand forever on dressers or mantelpieces in the homes of parents who try to look past the uniform and the hat to find the boy or girl who once was their child.

I realize now that it’s the third time I’ve written about that scene. In war there’s no predicting what comes to haunt you. I’m a journalist. I don’t have to follow orders. I can leave. Imagine what comes to haunt soldiers. And their families.

In the modern military, while the nondescript official photo is mounted on the wall, the actual body of the fallen soldier is gathered up and carried away. On FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) and COPs (Combat Outposts) in Afghanistan, men were lost every few days to ambush or IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) or a sniper’s bullet, only to be scooped up and tagged and body-bagged and shipped out while their buddies returned to base with memories of boys who had been with them in the morning. Having seen their comrades shot down or blown apart, surviving soldiers confront the presence of death. It blasts their illusions of invulnerability and shatters the newfound family to which they have learned to belong. Yet it is the job of soldiers to get up and go to work again the next day, or the next night, in the same place at the same tasks their friends were doing when things went wrong. It’s the job they signed up for and from which there is no escape. For all practical purposes, soldiers in the field have the status of slaves, the prisoners of their grand illusions, their training, and their army.

To keep up the fight, the military cannot allow its combat soldiers to dwell upon death, so it assigns the ghastly task of picking up the dead to certain specialists in Mortuary Affairs, a grim little military department always overstressed. Sometimes ordinary infantrymen gather up the bloody scraps of buddies blown up before their eyes, and they never forget. Sometimes medevac chopper crews collect the dead and dying and bring them back to big bases like Bagram or Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan where they hand off those who don’t make it to Mortuary Affairs. More often, the specialists of Mortuary Affairs, in their Hazmat suits and gloves, are the ones who pry charred corpses from burned vehicles, dump body parts into bags, scoop up with their cupped hands the bloody shards of flesh and bone and liquefied innards, and later, back at the mortuary on base, try to match the bits and pieces to disembodied heads.

People who work in Mortuary Affairs don’t like to talk about their job, which is to get the body parts of dead soldiers and all their personal belongings delivered to their designated next of kin as fast and respectfully as possible. Their official mission is to keep American bodies out of the hands of enemies who might desecrate them, and deliver them into the hands of families to bring some kind of closure (although for the survivors the subject will never be truly closed). An equally important, if unstated, mission is to conceal from soldiers the grisly and dispiriting sight of their own dead. Being a specialist in Mortuary Affairs is a kind of sacred trust and one of the most disturbing jobs in the military.

When Vicky Slater went to war, she had other tasks in mind. Twelve years earlier, she had joined the National Guard to be of service in her home state. Since then, she had married and borne two children, even while she rose in rank and paid her dues pulling people out of flooded houses and cleaning up after tornadoes. Knowing that the National Guard was never intended to be mobilized for combat in foreign wars, she was astonished when her unit was ordered to deploy to Afghanistan, but she prepared in the same spirit of service. She imagined that her mission was to help Afghan people. She read books about Afghanistan, including one I wrote about my work with Afghan civilians, and having read about Afghan women and girls imprisoned for moral crimes such as running away from home, she was determined to help them if she could. When I suggested that might not be easy to