Homecoming: PTSD, violence against women and other consequences of the unjust, illegal war in Iraq.

The front page article of the Sunday times delved into a multi-part series about veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq and the violent crimes they have committed since their return. According to the Times, 121 returned veterans have committed a killing since their return. Most of the victims have been their spouses or their children.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.
About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

If we haven’t already exhausted the reasons for why we should not be at war right now, let this be one of the issues that comes to the forefront of national attention. It is clear that the costs of war are more than the massive debt we have incurred or the horrendous damage we have done overseas, but also includes the use, abuse and disposal of young men and women, turning them into killing machines, that have little chance for normalcy afterwards. There is a line I always remember from Fahrenheit 9/11 where Michael Moore talks about how the first ones to go to war are usually the last ones to benefit from its outcomes. Young, working class men and women, young people of color, are being dragged to war, as pawns in our bizarrely maniacal, illegal attempt at imperialistic domination, while their communities continue to suffer even greater consequences.

The frustration, trauma and inability to regain a normal state of being is manifesting in abuse against spouses, children and friends. The mental health needs of war veterans have historically been ignored, usually the military asking media to keep such indiscretions under wraps.

The Pentagon was given The Times’s roster of homicides. It declined to comment because, a spokesman, Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, said, the Department of Defense could not duplicate the newspaper’s research. Further, Colonel Melnyk questioned the validity of comparing prewar and wartime numbers based on news media reports, saying that the current increase might be explained by “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.� He also questioned the value of “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide.�
Given that many veterans rebound successfully from their war experiences and some flourish as a result of them, veterans groups have long deplored the attention paid to the minority of soldiers who fail to readjust to civilian life.

The PTSD faced by soldiers after war has been a well documented fact for years. There is a connection between the trauma faced at war and the domestic violence reproduced at home when they attempt to return to their normal life. But despite knowing this, the services are limited. It is clear that the mental health needs of these young men and women that return maladjusted from the war are not a top priority concern of the people that are so readily sending them off to war.