Another good piece from Carl Prine
Repoduced under the fair use provision of the copyright act
Mind Over Matter
By Carl Prine Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 9:04 am
Posted in On History, On War
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/21/mind-over-matter/#ixzz1pld7HxD0
Combat veterans have been phoning me throughout our days, wanting to talk about Bob Bales, the staff sergeant who apparently murdered in their sleep 16 Afghan villagers in Pangwai — mostly women and children – and then built a pyre of babies and their mothers and lit it.
Some have sought to explain away the slaughter. The 38-year-old father was reeling from debt, maybe marital strife. He’d suffered from brain injury, probably depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d been drinking, maybe washing down pills to take the edge off the pain – mental or physical, probably both.
Perhaps he was one of the Madigan hundreds, men who desperately sought help for their anguish and were turned away, sent back to war as little better than malingerers because the Army cares most about numbers, and numbers should move down range.
Mind over matter, you know? They don’t mind. And you don’t matter.
Bales snapped, they whisper. It could happen to you, to me, anyone who has seen all that blood. It could and you know it, Carl. You know this.
This they say to me because I listen and don’t judge. Even when I know that they don’t really mean all of it because they also have had their brains bludgeoned by IEDs and they, too, have killed and watched their buddies die in parts and smears, and none of them — not one — shot babies, much less made them into burnt offerings to gods of war.
But you try telling that to men who see their wife in his. Or those who have come to believe that the children of Bales are like theirs, and this is probably so because all children are more like one another than they are us.
These men might’ve deserved some commendations, too, and never got them because they go to those of higher rank — even when they don’t really earn them. Same as a promotion Bales thought he might get but didn’t, because rank often is pinned on the man who went to war less and is still whole, not the broken soldier trying to recover.
Bales, they say, is like many other leaders told to buck up and go on another deployment because we need men who lead.
Mission accomplishment then troop welfare, all soldiers know this, even when they’re teetering on an edge.
My enlisted friends especially understand what it’s like to sit through hot nights on a cot in a fetid building on the cusp of a village that smells like piss, no one saying anything. Not after a day of staring into the sullen faces of Afghans, not after the triple stack lit the truck with a fire that burnt longer than Bales’ stack of babies.
That loneliness and anger become corporeal. A man can feel the weight of the plates as they dig into his back. He can see his left fist. It’s curled over the years into the oval of an M4 hand guard, much as a racecar driver’s hands will crease lap-by-lap into the shape of a wheel.
Perhaps when he’s falling asleep he can feel his right finger slowly squeeze a trigger of air, just as the thumb mindlessly flicks to auto. Again and again. Silently in time with our dreams. Killing the night.
You don’t even know why you’re doing it or even if you’re shooting. You leave that to your finger, your thumb, your hand and call it “muscle memory” because it makes it easier to forget what it really is.
Well, all dreams, I might say to you, really are dreams about yourselves. The faces you see are really you, some aspect of you anyway, just as the fears that are projected in nightmares are yours, too, those that otherwise would haunt your days if you didn’t stash them in evening shade.
It’s probably best that your hands are killing the night in your dreams. Better than yourself when awake. Or a village when drunk, I could say, even if you might not believe it.
You see, Bales is your nightmare awakened and marched through your day. He’s the out of place mirror to you, the man you fear you might become if your wife left, the docs numbed you with handfuls of pills and shamed you out of a profile. The monster after someone pours you a few drinks.
A loaded gun, staring out of a fetid room, toward a village that probably will kill you soon enough.
It doesn’t help that you sense your wife feels for his wife and wonders to herself whether you might ever snap, too. That the TV cameras would be on her front porch, staring past the curtains at a mess she wished she had picked up before America arrived.
These are natural fears, I say to you. Unavoidable, really. You’re coming to terms with a man you think you know but who has done things no man ever should. He disgusts you and yet you still ask of me absolution from sins you never committed. You do so because the trespasses against the village in Pangwai might as well have been done in your name by someone very much like you.
So say my friends who were enlisted.
*****
My friends the officers have been sadder still, and that surprised me.
They often call Bales a “kid,” even when he’s older than they are. They ask me what signs they should look for in their kids. “When is a man getting close to losing it?” they ask.
And I flatter myself by imaging the question isn’t rhetorical.
They feel that the Army, Fort Lewis, the infantry and all his leaders have failed this man, a soldier everyone can now concede never should’ve been redeployed to war, a man they wish had given some warning signs, some indication of indiscipline or pain so profound that he needed to be jailed for his own safety.
And that of babies who did this world no harm.
Or, worse, the officers mull over the more terrifying worry that he showed many signs and everyone missed them, or they didn’t care after they saw them, which also is plausible and that realization only makes it worse.
The grief of my officer friends is often inconsolable, even though they never knew Bales. It’s as if they’re looped in endless loops of regret, but I’ve come to believe that’s just because they’re officers.
The officer’s burden of command is like the plates that dig into a staff sergeant’s back, only they tug at his soul. Officers see Bales as one of their own men, and they sense that they’ve failed him, just as they constantly worry that they’ve failed their troops.
The good officers, anyway. Not the others.
The good officers fear that there are other men like Bales in the Army, so many after more than a decade of constant war, but they know that the mission won’t give them time to find them because troop welfare always comes second.
So I say to these men and the enlisted who give their jobs meaning what I have been saying to many people, even those who never have served.
You shall find no small number of victims as the pain radiates out of Pangwai: The wife and children of SSG Robert Bales, those who survived in the villages, the Special Forces soldiers who surely didn’t deserve to find the offal left in his wake and an Army that must bear the brunt of scandal for this tragedy while much of the rest of our democracy treats it as entertainment.
For those who are compassionate, you shall first remember those who got the worst in the exchange of these pains, the dead of Pangwai: Mohamed Dawood, Khudaydad, Nazar Mohamed, Payendo, Robeena, Shatarina, Zahra, Nazia, Masooma, Farida, Palwasha, Nabia, Esmatullah, Faizullah, Essa Mohamed and Akhtar Mohamed.
And if some of us say their names aloud, and it sounds like a prayer in a language ancient and unknown, it probably is, which is why we say it.
No man can own all of this pain, so quit trying to bear it away. No one of you is like Bales, even if you see him chased through your soul’s house of mirrors. But you know men who could be like him. Get them help.
Officers, be good leaders to your men. Serve them. Search out those who might become like this man and care for them, too, because ultimately this war isn’t worth another Bales, and you must rebuild an Army in the ashes of his pyre in Pangwai.
Yes, I agree, Bales isn’t a victim. But I also would say to you that he’s near enough to victims we know.
This your heart realizes even if your head doesn’t, much like a finger that tugs on an invisible trigger as you sleep, the thumb flicking steadily onto auto.
Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/21/mind-over-matter/#ixzz1plcULGV8
I just don't think they ever wanted us there in the south honestly.)
