More mentally ill soldiers heading to Iraq
3/28/2006 6:00:00 PM GMT

Soldiers who suffer from combat-induced psychological problems are returning to Iraq

Facing wartime recruitment shortfalls, the U.S. army is desperately seeking to recruit and keep soldiers in Iraq. The Stop-Loss option in soldiers’ contracts keeps them in uniform for months or years after the expiration of their service term. The National Guard is being sent overseas to a previously unprecedented extent. And military standards have been lowered to meet recruitment goals, that criminal misconduct or alcohol and drug abuse no longer disqualify new recruits.

The U.S. army is now sending “mentally ill” soldiers back to Iraq, according to an editorial on AfterDowningStreet.org. Such a move deeply affects the mental health of these already unstable soldiers, as well as their effectiveness in combat. Mental health doctors agree that the greater people’s exposure to combat, the higher risk of suffering mental illness. Sending disturbed soldiers back to Iraq also affects the Iraqis, raising their death toll.

“If people are suffering from mental-health problems, they should not be sent on the battlefield,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer who recently formed the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health, which is expected to start work next month.

Pentagon officials claim that they don’t know the exact number of soldiers sent back to Iraq while taking mental-health medication or the number of those diagnosed with mental illness. But medical officers for the Army and Marine Corps acknowledge that medicated service members, and those suffering from combat-induced psychological problems, are returning to war.

Recent surveys, backed by the U.S. government’s own studies, show that the number could be significant. According to a 2004 army report, more than 17% of combat-seasoned infantrymen experienced major depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder after one combat tour to Iraq. Less than 40% of them had sought mental-health care. A Pentagon survey released last month also found that 35% of the troops returning from Iraq had received psychological counseling during their first year home.

Not only does the military send those emotionally disturbed soldiers back to Iraq, but it pressures mental health professionals treating these soldiers to minimize the extent of their health problems and declare them fit to return. “They (army doctors) are being told to diagnose combat-stress reaction instead of the more serious post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),“ said Steve Robinson, director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, Md. “That does two things: It keeps the troops deployable and it makes it hard for them to collect disability claims once they get out of the military.”

In addition to putting these soldiers’ own mental health at risk, sending them back to combat poses a serious threat to the lives of the Iraqis. Stress reduces a person's chances of functioning well in combat, said Frank M. Ochberg, a psychiatrist for 40 years and a founding member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

These unstable soldiers are armed with lethal weapons and often face situations in which they should make split-second life-or-death decisions. So what is the quality of decision-making by highly stressed soldiers, whether they suffer from “PTSE” or even “combat-stress reaction?

The memoirs of some American soldiers in Iraq show that they feel alienated from the Iraqis. Soldier Colby Buzzell, in his My War: Killing Time in Iraq, describes being “hit with the realization that I’m on the other side of the planet far away from home, and that I’m a stranger in a really strange land” (p. 297).

American troops are so alienated from the Iraqis that they have a number of names for them, as Kayla Williams wrote in Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army: “[W]e called them hajjis, but we also called them sadiqis… or habibis…. We called them towelheads. Ragheads. Camel jockeys. The “F“ locals. Words that didn’t see our enemy as people – as somebody’s father or son or brother or uncle” (p. 200)

In such a climate of alienation, combined with a growing sense of insecurity, even mentally healthy soldiers have emotional difficulties. For example, Jason Christopher Hartley, author of the memoir Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq, describes his attempts to refuse to leave the war-torn country: “n all honesty, I did it because I didn’t want to leave Iraq. One of the ways to cope with being in combat is to go crazy just a tiny bit and learn to enjoy the work… I was afraid that if I left, it would be difficult to get back into the ‘combat is fun’ way of thinking when I returned” (p. 279).