The demons behind death and brutality
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Understandably, the mass media will devote huge coverage to the forthcoming courts martial and federal trial of some serving US troops and one ex-soldier accused of rape, multiple murders and the burning of the rape victim’s body in Mahmudiya, Iraq. But it will likely be the imminent appearance of a specialist journal with minuscule readership that casts the most illuminating light on this terrible case’s background.
The journal is Alcohol Research and Health, published quarterly by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and its important article currently in the press is “Alcohol Use among Young Adults in the Military”. The authors are medical anthropologist Dr Genevieve Ames and epidemiologist Dr Carol Cunradi, who both work out of the University of California, Berkeley’s Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, where much of their work is funded by the US Department of Defense. Besides alcohol abuse, the two colleagues share expertise in, to use their clinical researchers’ understated phrase, “interpersonal violence”.
According to Dr Ames: “The military is very much aware that they have an alcohol problem”.
They haven't always had the problem. After the Vietnam war's rampant upsurge in alcohol and drug abuse, whose ravages are still being seen in and around just about every Veterans’ Administration facility in the country, the military started vigorously overhauling its morale, and there was actually a lessening in the recorded incidence of alcoholism throughout the armed forces. This improvement, starting in the 1980s, continued through to the new millennium, but then (it would seem around 2002) a new and disturbing rise was registered by a Pentagon survey.
Drs Ames and and Cunradi cite a survey that conducted a standardized comparison of heavy drinking by 18-25 year-olds. In more of their academics' understated language, they say “the prevalence of heavy alcohol use among young military personnel differs markedly from that of civilians in the same age group”. For "markedly", others of us might say "by almost double", since the survey found heavy drinking among just over 32% of young military personnel compared with just under 18% of young civilians.
Alcohol use certainly appears to have played its part in the Mahmudiya atrocity.
Attorneys for the accused have let it be known to select media that they will employ as a defense tactic the men's “extreme emotional stress” because of the undoubted strain caused by difficult combat conditions. But according to charge sheets leaked to the Associated Press and the Washington Post, the defense will have to deal with allegations that four out of the five named men drank quantities of illicit local whiskey - and took time out to hit some golf balls - before donning black clothing to raid the house where their 14 year-old victim lived ... rape her ... kill her, her five year-old sister and parents ... and pour kerosene over her dead body and set it afire.
Afterward, prosecution documents charge, they destroyed their clothing. Premeditation is also suggested in the allegation that the teenager had been targeted some time before, once she'd been spotted from the soldier's checkpoint.
Alcohol and drug use feature strongly in the personal history of Steven Green, the ex-private facing a civilian trial (above right, in his post-arrest photo) having been discharged - honorably, under the Army's rules - for having an "anti-social personality disorder". (Before this disorder was discovered, the Army apparently felt he was typical enough to illustrate some of its Iraq duties that it issued a photo, through the Army News Service, of Green aiming his rifle at a padlocked door - above left.)
In his home state of Texas, Green was jailed in January 2005 for possession of alcohol as a minor (he was 19 at the time) and a little over three years before that he was fined $350 for possession of drug paraphernalia. As so often in alcohol cases, trouble with alcohol was part of the family background, too. His mother served a six month jail sentence for drunk driving in 2000.
It was only a few days after Green's own jail-time that he enlisted in the Army, under its newly and rapidly increasing use of "moral waivers" for recruits with criminal records.
The warping of judgment and of moral values that excess alcohol wreaks will often, history demonstrates, accompany atrocities both military and civilian. It's chilling to note that the military's own newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, had a writer, Andrew Tilghman, embedded with Green's unit - and that he conducted interviews with the ex-private which never got published.
From his home back in Houston, Tilghman now reports that Green told him, after shooting an Iraqi "guy who wouldn't stop", that it was far from a life-changing experience for him. "Over here", he reasoned, "killing people is like squashing an ant".