Tag: Afghanistan

The Kill Switch

Somehow it’s a dirty little secret that the entire purpose of war is to kill human beings. That vastly important fact is becoming more well-known thanks to the work of authors and journalists like Phil Zabriskie, a former foreign correspondent for Time who has also written for National Geographic, The Washington Post Magazine, and other notable outlets. He’s more than a war correspondent, though. He’s made a study of the subject of combat. He fine tuned that study with an in-depth exploration on killing in war in his latest book, a Kindle Single called The Kill Switch.

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Zabriskie delves into the phenomenon of killing with considerable skill. He expands our understanding of the concept into the societal and institutional context and contracts it into the personal. It’s perhaps the latter that gives the book its stark, chilling nature. The author chronicles the lives of several participants of the Iraq and Afghan Wars to illustrate the powerful psychological forces at work in the act of killing and the impact of the moral injury that killing causes. His coverage of these men over roughly a decade paints a clear picture of the entire process of learning to kill, applying those lessons, and attempting to find peace with that act. For instance, we learn about a Marine, Ben Nelson, who struggles with the times he killed and the times he didn’t. We learn of a Marine officer who bears the emotional burden of ordering men to kill as well as taking lives himself, and how the strict enforcement of the rules of engagement protected civilian lives as well as the combatants’ humanity. We see them in war. Then we see them in their living rooms. We see their pain with a clarity that speaks highly of Zabriskie’s expertise in recording the grim truth of war.

To his credit, Zabriskie lets the subject and those who lived it speak for themselves. But he’s packaged those voices in a concise and fast-flowing narrative, one that is buttressed by interviews with psychologists and research into relevant scholarship. It’s an engaging, educating read.

Although the book is short, it is long on authenticity and insight. Zabriskie has created a work that offers real-world examples of some of the ideas first explored by Dave Grossman. He has made a clear argument for the fact that killing is one of the most traumatic experiences of combat, and it is the very essence of war. How we treat that haunting truth – that we collectively flip a kill switch when we go to war – is up to us as a society, but Phil Zabriskie has done a remarkable job of defining it for his readers.

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(Review contributed by David P. Ervin)

Down the Rabbit Hole

by David P. Ervin

I asked a buddy how he was doing the other day. I keep in touch pretty regularly with “Doc,” a combat medic who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. We live in the same town, but I hadn’t heard from in a while. He replied with a phrase that’s emerged in the lexicon of American combat veterans of the War on Terror; two words that act as a euphemism for a chilling component of life after war.

“Rabbit hole.”

Of course, we’re not talking about having tea with the Mad Hatter here. We’re talking about a flashback.

I knew what he was experiencing. Your palms sweat. Breaths come deeply and rhythmically as your body maximizes oxygen intake. Your heart thumps within a tightened chest as it pushes blood to every limb. Eyes dart and hair stands up. It’s not a hallucination in which you believe that you’re in another place and another time. Rather, you feel like it. Something (sometimes nothing) has elicited a very physical and emotional memory, a frighteningly intense mental space that we first discovered in combat. As Brian Mockenhaupt aptly wrote, they are the “darkened areas that for many remain unexplored. And once these darkened spaces are lit, they become a part of us.” Often, our time back in those places passes quickly. Sometimes, it does not. And, other times, we give in to the immense gravity those memories exert and venture further down the rabbit hole.

RabbitHoleImage1So I wasn’t surprised when Doc began sending me links to videos from the wars. On occasion some of us indulge ourselves in the imagery and sounds of combat. We scratch that itch in a way that’s masochistic, nostalgic, and indicative of the bizarre allure of adrenaline. Modern technology has created an internet that is awash with footage of combat. We can take our pick between an Apache strike, a machine gun’s hammering rattle, or a stream of tracers racing across those all-too-familiar cityscapes. Anyone can. Many do. We wouldn’t be the first generation to revisit these things. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussel told us about World War One veterans of Great Britain purchasing phonograph records of the sounds of artillery bombardments on the Western Front.

And, of course, as veterans we’re not really so unique in this regard, either.

There is a reason these images are at our fingertips. If America is honest with itself, we are all fascinated with war and violence on some level. It permeates our culture whether we served in war or not. Those who haven’t experienced it can be drawn to it by curiosity, and the less those who truly understand talk about it – the more it’s a dirty little secret – the greater the pull of this curiosity. David Grossman has taken it a step further in pointing out that the prevalence of fictionalized violence in video games, television, and film is widespread, so much so that it has warped our society’s fundamental understanding and beliefs about violence. Indeed, he went as far to say that the more dishonest we are about the true nature of violence, the more we associate it with positive feelings and thus perpetuate it. For most, those spectacles are just that – exciting images and sounds.

Of course, combat veterans know better. We know what a grotesque reality it is to kill and be killed. It’s the harshest reality we’ve had to face. So why would those of us ‘in the know’ seek to face this reality again by seeking out this imagery? Are we subjecting ourselves to some kind of punishment? Not really.

Down there in the rabbit hole, we fumble around in the dark for reasons why we’re there. We look in every corner of our current reality to make sense of the emotions. But for the myriad of possibilities, there is one single reason why they really occur – it’s a memory. Immersing ourselves in the images and sounds of war allow us to establish a concrete, logical connection between the way we feel now and the way we felt then. It’s a reminder that we are not insane. Our bodies and minds just hold distinct, vivid memories, and those memories have powerful emotional content. We can make sense of it, and that understanding is somewhat of a comfort even if the mechanisms we use to comprehend it make us feel strange.

Were Americans frank about their fascination with war and thorough in its desire to understand, we wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable about remembering. But we live in a conflicted society, one that alternates between peacemongering during war and warmongering in peace. Perhaps if the imagery of war and violence were packed with the horrible punch that we feel that fascination would dissipate. At the least, it would be understood for what it is.

So we write and attempt to tell stories to explain, to give a gateway into the emotional context that surrounds the phenomenon of war. We do so in the hopes that everyone can understand that it’s not really something we miss as much as it is something we can’t forget.

And we try to let others know that when they go chasing rabbits down those holes, they’re not alone.      

The Price We Pay

by Travis Switalski, Sr.

The places where we fought are more than names on a paper map. They are more than colored areas between black lines on a globe. They are real places where we struggled and poured sweat in the blazing heat. They are places that we loved to hate but fought for anyway. Day in and day out we went out on foot in these places, surrounded by danger and far from the comforts of home. We were told that we were doing it for freedom, for the people, for America – to avenge her honor. Despite the rhetoric of our noble cause, people in these places on a map fought us to the death. We were doing the most important thing that we would ever do in our lives. But after a while, it went unnoticed by many, save for the ticker across the bottom of the screen and thirty second sound bites. The wars lasted longer than the American attention span.

September 11th, 2001 was the day that America bought stock in the Global War on Terrorism. Flags were unfurled, speeches were delivered, and promises of justice were made. Hundreds of thousands of Americans lined up to join the military. We were all in. We were united as a country, out for blood and revenge. When the President said that we would go after terrorists and those who harbor them, everyone cheered him on. We were in this together, as a nation.

We invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq. The American public and media were still very much a part of the “we” who invaded those far-away lands. We watched the bombing of Tora Bora and the tunnel searches of “Operation Anaconda.” America held its breath waiting for Osama Bin Laden to be killed or captured. The war had top billing on every news channel all of the time. Then waited while Sadaam Hussein let the clock run out and “Shock and Awe” began. Vast columns of tanks and trucks crossed the desert and wiped out Iraq’s Republican Guard. America “liberated” Iraq. We had accomplished the mission. Soon after, the glamorous spectacles were over. The wars were not.

An insurgency began in Iraq. They were faceless, borne of a complicated political situation. People without uniforms, generals, or regard for their fellow Iraqis attacked us. Roadside bombs caused horrific wounds. Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen came home in flag draped metal coffins in a relentless, steady march. It got uncomfortable.PriceWePay1

America had been told that the mission had been accomplished, that it had won. An insurgency is not what they’d bargained for. Gradually, flags were put back in closets and bright yellow car magnets that said “Support Our Troops” faded to white. Rather than try to understand, many who had the option tuned out like it was a television show that had lost its luster. They had the luxury of choice.

But the military kept paying its dues. We were subjected to multiple tours of duty in combat. Back-to-back without breaks we flew to the desert to fight. America thanked us for our service but let us and our families carry the burden of war alone. Top billing went to celebrity dance shows and singing contests as our fights and our losses went unnoticed. The nation that had come together had become indifferent. America was war weary. America was tired.

America has lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The political and social steam that launched the wars ran out quickly. The Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen who fought the wars won the battles, but ultimately the sacrifice and the fighting was for not. America’s unwillingness to finish what it started, to make payments on its investment, has given rise to new threats. They are the spectacles on the news today. They are born from the threats we didn’t have the stomach to fight yesterday.

The enemies we engaged have occupied the places on the map where we fought and died. The people there suffer still. They, the veterans who fought there, and the families they came home to (or didn’t) can’t change the channel. They can’t cash out so easily. They’re still paying. The burden of that investment has, until recently, rested solely upon them. The chaos of the Middle East won’t go away because we tune it out. Eventually, everyone will pay. Maybe it will be in the form of another, nastier war, fought in those same real places.

Soldiers will always fight when asked. Likely, they’ll fight another enemy that’s little understood, in a place most can’t point to on those colored maps.

History repeats itself. And these wars, like others, have an impact that’s felt long after the beat of the war drums fades away. The dividends of war are terrible. Far from an abstract idea, far from a segment of the news that grows wearisome over time, wars are fought in real places. Real people suffer. If we want to learn from history, this is the time. The real evil that’s been unleashed in those real places represents the steep price we pay for not having paid attention to history.

Building Hope From Tragedy: The Naslund Story

“Yet we few pay such a heavy price in hopes that our
Efforts might keep children, now yet just little boys,
From having to decide their innocence and lust for life
may best be sacrificed”

-excerpt from “Once Again to Be a Little Boy” by Dillion Naslund

I read this poem over and over. Its twenty-three lines contain a message that’s chilling yet bright, sad but hopeful. It articulates the internal conflict between the pain of post-traumatic stress and the deeply felt honor of military service, speaking volumes about how we attempt to reconcile the weight of all that. But the story behind this poem and its author, infantry Sergeant Dillion Naslund, is one that’s haunting – and hopeful – as the poem itself.

It was written six months before he ended his own life.

Naslund1Dillion Naslund was a normal kid, says his mother, Lisa. He was an avid outdoorsman, gregarious, and action oriented. Being such a hard charger, it was little surprise to their family that when he decided to enlist in the military he chose the Army infantry. Dillion joined during high school and became a member of the Iowa National Guard’s 34th Infantry Division, The Red Bulls. The surprises came later. After deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, “we expected him to be different,” his mother said. “But there was no way to prepare for what would come.”

Naslund2Dillion changed after his second deployment. He was plagued by nightmares and flashbacks and was prone to bouts of depression and anxiety. He coped with alcohol. Although close with his family, he rarely talked about his experiences in combat. War had altered him dramatically. “So much was the opposite of what he was before.” In August 2012, alarm bells rang for the family when they learned that he was contemplating harming himself. They took him to the emergency room, and he was sent to a VA hospital for a time. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and began treatment. But the “beast” that was PTSD, and the magnitude of the battle he and his family had to face, was “too much, too big,” and came on “too fast.” The battle ended in his suicide in December 2012.

The Naslunds did their best to recover, grieving deeply and privately. But they were shocked and overwhelmed all over again when they learned that 22 veterans committed suicide every day. That’s when Lisa and her husband, Jeff, decided that they “had to do something to make a difference.” And they have in many ways.

dilliontitlecardBy sharing their experience, it was their hope to prevent the type of tragedy they knew all too well. Family friend and film-maker Tom Zwemke offered to help by creating a documentary film featuring Dillion’s story. Then they began reaching out to other families, like Howard and Jean Somers of California, who also lost their son to suicide. A letter of condolence from one mother to another led to collaboration on Operation Engage America, an organization that holds events devoted to raising awareness about the issues facing American veterans and providing education about the means to address them. The Naslunds launched a website that helps families and veterans alike navigate the bevy of resources available for help with PTSD.

It was the beginning of filming for the documentary that led to another surprise, that of a poem that surfaced written by their son: “Once Again to Be a Little Boy.”

Lisa says Dillion had “zero interest” in writing. So they were skeptical when his fellow soldier, Shannon, brought them a worn piece of paper containing the poem. Shannon told the family that Dillion had written it over the course of a long, problematic night spent at his house. They were amazed at the depth of the message it contained and came to learn much about their son’s frame of mind and the shape of the beast with which he was grappling. The more they read and thought about it, they came to believe something else:

“That poem, and him writing it, gave us more time with him.”

The Naslunds have made it their mission to give others time – and hope – any way they can. Their son’s death served as a way for his fellow soldiers to open up about their problems, knowing they weren’t alone. All across the country, people have contacted the family directly for help. They’ve made an impact in a broader sense as well. The Naslunds have saved many, many more through their significant contribution to raising awareness about PTSD and the veteran suicide epidemic.

The overall message they wish to convey is to reach out, communicate, and remain hopeful. “PTSD is not a death sentence…there is hope. If one thing doesn’t work, try another.” Getting help “starts with a conversation,” one that the Naslunds are fostering among families across the country.

The family’s latest surprise? Although “never a writer,” their son will be a published poet in As You Were: The Military Review, Vol. 2 in May 2015.

 

(contributed by David P. Ervin)