In response to my To heal or to patch? Military mental health workers in Iraq, a reader, Christopher Bradley, has sent me the following story:
In the late 80s, early 90s I was friends, and for a while a roommate, with a mental health counselor with the 7th Light Infantry Division, then at Fort Ord outside of Monterey, California. He was very up front in conversations with me that the function of a mental health counselor in the Army was not to help the client but to return them to their unit as swiftly as possible and up front that this was the official policy of his unit, and the Army generally in regards to mental health. This NCO was aware of the moral quandaries of his job, but felt powerless to do anything about them. He was, after all, only a sergeant. (At the time, I accepted this reasoning. I have grown more morally nuanced since then in many areas.)
An officer in his unit, Captain Christopher C** [name deleted], was getting his Ph.D in psychology sponsored by the military, because he was doing studies about increasing aggression in young men! He laughed about it and did not seem to see the depravity of that position.
November 30th, 2005
In response to my recent piece on military mental health workers in Iraq, Andrew Pollack from Brooklyn sent me the following comments he had posted on a listserv. It concerns a recent Los Angeles Times article [A Journey That Ended in Anguish] on a military ethicist who, confronted with the rampant corruption in the Iraq occupation, ended up committing suicide. In response, a psychologist suggested that his lack of acceptance of the profit motive was pathological:
************* Andrew’s Comments **********************
I’m surprised no one commented yet on this piece of the article: “A psychologist… said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
“Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited,” wrote Lt. Col. Lisareitenbach. “He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses.”
Do you hear what this pig is saying? She’s not talking about private corruption (certainly because to protect her job she’ll deny it exists). She’s saying that Westhusing was wrong — in fact, that he was mentally unbalanced — to think his military ethics were more valid than profit-seeking!
The US military has always been the source of rampant corruption by camp travellers and back-home contractors — but this shrink is saying the new, open level to which it’s been taken by Bush is to be considered the norm and that anyone who challenges it is crazy!
Now Brian is right about the pitfalls of an overly rigid mortality for a soldier, and that would be true no matter the class character of the army (although a proletarian army has to have a superior, if still flexible, moral code). But that’s separate from the range of what’s considered acceptable — and even sane — in various bourgeois armies.
November 30th, 2005