Other voices: War's trauma comes home

For those who spend their days trying to prevent violence by members of the armed forces, life must be much like a recurring nightmare. No matter how hard they strain, home-front casualties continue to mount.

Neither Fort Bragg nor the Army is unique in this respect, but a recent string of deaths and other violent offenses involving troops from our region has the wheels spinning again as officials look for a key, or just a common denominator.

Don’t look for it in the types of crime. Incidents listed in an Observer report include suicides, unexplained deaths, “domestic” violence, violence against apparent strangers and assaults on authority figures (although some might belong in the “suicide by cop” category). And where does a 30 percent increase, Army-wide, in violent sex crimes fit into this picture? More than half of those victims were women between ages 18 and 21. How are we to explain such selectivity?

There’s one thing for which the Pentagon, for all its efforts to get a handle on these problems, can’t escape accountability. When it needed troops, it lowered recruitment standards — education, criminal records, mental health problems. And now that it needs to lose troops, it’s dumping troublemakers it recruited. That’s disastrous for the ones whose less-than-honorable discharges leave them ineligible for medical benefits.

Statistics on prescription drugs and addiction are in some respects less damning. If a prescription is helping a soldier cope with a mental problem when his alternative is confinement to a psychiatric ward, that’s a plus, not a minus. Still, it’s disturbing that 14 percent of soldiers need chemicals in order to carry out their duties.

The Army’s moves to strengthen its medical force, on the other hand, are entirely positive, and the fact that PTSD is overwhelming every branch’s resources, and those of the Veterans Administration, shouldn’t obscure that. Nor can the Army be fairly accused of ignoring prevention. The stigma that so often adheres to mental illness is being slowly peeled away.

It may be that what’s missing is even earlier intervention.

At the recruiting office, the military can screen out those most likely to become liabilities, and be brutally candid with the rest: War is no movie; there’s a big risk that mental impairment will be among whatever wounds are sustained. And every basic trainee should learn that thresholds lowered in country must be raised when a deployment ends — hard work that no one is born knowing how to perform.

We’ve come far. And we have far to go.

— Fayetteville Observer