They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars by Ann Jones (2013) (read in 2022)

“Doctors and the military command often find themselves at cross purposes because doctors want to save lives, not patch people up for demolition in the next battle, while the generals want their soldiers back.”

“At first, Mortuary Affairs specialists were asked to fingerprint the dead and submit the results on a printed form, but many of the dead had no fingers, while other fingers were attached to no body. Sometimes the Mortuary Affairs specialists found on a dismembered corpse a pocket with a wallet containing ID, sometimes a name printed on a shirt, sometimes a dog tag carried in a boot. With that to go on, they tried to match up the parts. But a lot of the parts were “just meat.””

“[…] war is obsolete. Most nations don’t make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious “coalition.” The earth is so small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.”

“We were inside the American military bubble that encompasses more than 1,000 bases around the world of all sizes and strategic shapes, but all more or less alike in fundamentals. American planes carry American equipment and American soldiers from one base to another inside that bubble.”

“Of the 300,000 Americans who fought in World War I, 50,000 were still hospitalized for psychiatric disorders 20 years later. The violence of war does not end, even when peace is declared. Often it merely recedes from public to private life.”

“It’s possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skills, it actually detracts from civilian medicine by diverting resources, research, and personnel from medical practices more relevant and applicable to the general good.”

“[…] Craig Hospital is not only a Level III Trauma Center, but also the medevac pathway to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and beyond to the United States.”

“Current basic training gives the formula one significant twist: while impressing upon the soldier his inferiority to his military masters, it swells his sense of superiority over others—women, weaker men, “lesser” races, designated enemies, and civilians.”

“Military leaders called to account told a Congressional hearing that soldiers’ suicides were “triggered” by various “stressors.” Number one was “relationship issues,” a term that in military usage places the blame on wives and girlfriends. It’s code for “bitches” who aren’t “faithful” and “whores” who send Dear John letters by email.”

“By 2012, some 663,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were classed as having partial or complete service-connected disabilities—that’s one of every four of the 2.3 million who served in those wars.”

“One third of the soldiers in the Army were on prescription medications in 2010, and nearly half of them—76,500—were on opioid painkillers.”

“They know that a clever person just needs to find the right racket to profit endlessly from America’s endless wars. So many do. That, too, has become the new normal.”

“Tens of thousands of workers, recruited often with false promises of high wages in posh places like Dubai, paid high fees to recruiters only to find themselves in Iraq or Afghanistan, confined within bases, often stripped of their passports, with no recourse but to work for next to nothing.”

“The percentages shift as deployments change, making for slippery and often deceptive statistics. For example, the report noted that only 45,000 American troops were then left in Iraq, but it somehow neglected to mention that a shadow army of 64,250 private contractors still remained.”

“[…] those kids who drank the recruiters’ Kool-Aid and died, and those who still bravely soldier on with their brand-new titanium legs and blasted genitals and decommissioned brains.”

“At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in 2011, I met a woman from a small town in West Virginia, the mother of a 19-year-old soldier whose legs and genitals were blasted to pulp in Afghanistan. She quit her job and moved to a motel near the hospital, then in Washington D.C., to care for him, while her husband worked a second job at home to make up for part of her lost wages. She had been at the hospital for six months. She hoped to bring her son home someday—perhaps in another year or so—and she expected to take care of him for the rest of his life, or hers. She said, “People expect me to be happy that he survived, and I believe I am, but I can’t really remember what happy feels like.””

“[…] war is obsolete. Most nations don’t make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious “coalition.” The earth is so small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.”

“Of the 300,000 Americans who fought in World War I, 50,000 were still hospitalized for psychiatric disorders 20 years later. The violence of war does not end, even when peace is declared. Often it merely recedes from public to private life.”

“At first, Mortuary Affairs specialists were asked to fingerprint the dead and submit the results on a printed form, but many of the dead had no fingers, while other fingers were attached to no body. Sometimes the Mortuary Affairs specialists found on a dismembered corpse a pocket with a wallet containing ID, sometimes a name printed on a shirt, sometimes a dog tag carried in a boot. With that to go on, they tried to match up the parts. But a lot of the parts were “just meat.””

“the Mortuary Affairs specialists, who know much more than the average soldier about death in war, are mostly ruined. Goodell summed up her view of war this way: “War is disgusting and horrific. It never leaves the people who were involved in it. The damage is far greater than the lists of casualties or cost in dollars. It permeates lifestyles. It infects cultures and people and worldviews. The war is never over for us. The fighting stops. The troops get called back. But the war goes on for those damaged by war.””

“My minder’s advertised purpose is to guide and inform me on this trip to Afghanistan, but he seems never to have been out of the States before himself. He drags an immense suitcase full of well-pressed uniforms, and lugs a bulky camera bag, a fat expandable attaché, and a leather case containing a computer with no international adapter. At Ramstein, foiled by European electrical sockets and his own locked American cell phone, he complains that Germany doesn’t have “up to date electricity” or a “modern phone system.” “I guess this is what they mean by Old Europe,” he says. He is my own perilously innocent personal public affairs officer, in way over his head, but a soldier nonetheless, and so he politely does his job. Already he is fast asleep.”

“We were inside the American military bubble that encompasses more than 1,000 bases around the world of all sizes and strategic shapes, but all more or less alike in fundamentals. American planes carry American equipment and American soldiers from one base to another inside that bubble.”

“Those in danger of losing their lives, limbs, or eyes take priority, and most of them are brought to Bagram because Craig Hospital is not only a Level III Trauma Center, but also the medevac pathway to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and beyond to the United States.”

“By the end of the Soviet occupation, Afghanistan had been strewn with more landmines than anyplace else on earth, and demining never progressed very far. More than two decades later, landmines still kill or disable Afghans at the rate of 30 to 60 every month. Afghans know that walking around in the countryside is dangerous, but when American generals resurrected counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine from the disastrous war in Vietnam, they ordered soldiers to get out of their vehicles and conduct “dismounted patrols” in places farmers knew enough to leave alone.”

“Doctors and the military command often find themselves at cross purposes because doctors want to save lives, not patch people up for demolition in the next battle, while the generals want their soldiers back.”

“At least ten times bigger than Bagram’s Craig Hospital with ten times the staff, LRMC cares for an amazing array of patients, suggesting the scope of the empire it serves: from thousands of retired U.S. military personnel who live permanently in Europe—more than 6,000 in Germany alone—to an unknown number of civilians from 47 countries under private contract to the Department of Defense, plus 245,000 U.S. service members and their families in the European Command, as well as “all injured U.S. service members and [private] contractors” and members of 44 coalition forces serving in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, and Pacific Command.”

“The trauma chief says, “Civilian doctors have opportunities here to practice surgeries more complex than anything they’ve done before. They will carry that knowledge back to their practices in the States and improve the quality of medicine there.” Maybe so, but I wonder if this is to be the civilians’ reward for paying taxes into the war chest: the possibility of getting a combat-experienced brain surgeon when we’re shot in the head at the mall.”

“I’m certain that when the urological surgeon cut off the penis of his first surgical patient at Bagram and discarded it in a bin of surgical waste he wasn’t thinking that this technique would advance his career or the state of urological surgery in American civilian hospitals.”

“Even as military doctors, they all have professional interests quite different from the bloody salvage work they are asked to do. In stateside life, one doctor is a pediatrician, another a breast cancer specialist, another a urological oncologist; one neurologist does advanced research on Parkinson’s disease, another on Alzheimer’s.

“Just as they were assigned to military hospitals downrange, the Department of Defense awarded generous grants of taxpayer money to insure that civilian researchers back in the United States would shift their focus to military needs, suspending work on cognition to study TBI, for example, or giving up lung cancer research to study the carcinogenic effects of toxic smoke at burn pits on U.S. military bases.”

“Some advances paid for by taxpayers, such as new electronic prosthetics, are the exclusive property of the military, and so expensive that even when they eventually find their way into private civilian medicine they probably won’t be widely available. It’s possible that the chief of trauma surgery has things backwards. It’s possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skills, it actually detracts from civilian medicine by diverting resources, research, and personnel from medical practices more relevant and applicable to the general good.”

“To stop the convulsive effort to breath[e], the doctor can paralyze him and let the ventilator do the work of respiration, but that means removing from his intestine the feeding tube pumping in the calories he needs to heal these catastrophic wounds. It’s a fine line, and the team walks it for the next hour until it’s clear the man needs rest more than nourishment. Then the doctor administers a drug, the body grows still as stone, and the soldier inside sleeps softly while the ventilator steadily breathes in and breathes out.”

“He doesn’t think much of military bosses or politicians or Americans in general who send the lowliest one percent to fight wars that make the other one percent, on the high end, “monufuckinmentally rich.””

““So what’s to love?”

““Shit. You don’t even know, do ya? Shootin’ people. Blowin’ shit up. It’s fuckin’ fun. I fuckin’ love it.”

“I search his voice for a boy’s bravado, but I hear intensity and a kind of hyperactive glee. I say, “I believe you really mean that.”

““No shit,” he says. “I’m trying to educate you.””

“Before I leave the room, I spend some few long minutes sinking my fingers into the fur of the ginger-colored golden retriever who slumbers at the edge of the platform, the therapy dog whose dumb animal presence is meant to make amends for the mistakes of men.”

“I looked over at Sherry to whom the military had delivered a semi-comatose child and now sent a deeply damaged emissary to blame “civilians” for the fact that even after six years of intensive family and professional care he didn’t seem to “fit in.” Sherry was gazing at her son, as if to gauge his response, and smiling with gratitude that the eminent colonel had come all this way to address a personal message to the big boy in the big chair who was nothing at all like the boy she had raised.”

“Current basic training gives the formula one significant twist: while impressing upon the soldier his inferiority to his military masters, it swells his sense of superiority over others—women, weaker men, “lesser” races, designated enemies, and civilians.”

“Shay goes on to assert that “moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated.””

“2,293 soldiers killed themselves during that decade. Suicides jumped 50 percent between 2001 and 2008 alone, enough after seven years of war to catch the attention of Congress. The volunteer military was already short-handed, so losing personnel at such a pace supposedly posed a threat to national security.

“Military leaders called to account told a Congressional hearing that soldiers’ suicides were “triggered” by various “stressors.” Number one was “relationship issues,” a term that in military usage places the blame on wives and girlfriends. It’s code for “bitches” who aren’t “faithful” and “whores” who send Dear John letters by email.

“Additional stressors the military leaders cited were: work-related problems, financial pressure, legal concerns, alcoholism, and substance abuse. Conspicuously absent from the list of triggers of soldier suicide was the experience of war itself and the brutal betrayals of “what’s right” that lie at its heart.”

“[…] researchers have already found in veterans irreversible respiratory damage attributable to the toxic fallout of trash burns on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s the result of enormous, long-lasting bonfires of chemicals, metals, body waste, and all those plastic bottles that once contained drinking water imported at vast expense to save our troops from downing the local stuff. All that trash burns with a deadly black smoke.”

“Facts pile up: a 2006 study shows that “returning veterans were 75 percent more likely to die in traffic accidents than civilians of comparable age, race and sex. They were 148 percent more likely to be killed on motorcycles.” The studies and statistics go on and on, and so do the deaths.”

““What about that band of brothers?” I ask him, and he entrusts to me a truth I’ve heard from many troubled soldiers in my travels. He tells me the biggest military secret of all: that the special bonds of soldiers are not what they’re cracked up to be. They are the bonds of men united in common tasks that can suddenly swerve from boring to terrifying and back again.

“Such circumstances demand a “manly” demeanor that discourages “feeling things” for others who might get blown sky high at any moment. A soldier—man or woman—has to wear that mask of manliness because to break down in front of your buddies is to acknowledge the deep shit all of you are in and so jeopardize their safety and your own.”

“In a combat zone soldiers are always fearful, though “alert” is the term they use, and always aware that survival depends on the guys in the unit. They may not even like each other, let alone talk to each other, but a battle buddy becomes a kind of magic talisman whose survival seems to guarantee your own.”

“By 2012, some 663,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were classed as having partial or complete service-connected disabilities—that’s one of every four of the 2.3 million who served in those wars.”

“[…] of course it turned out—you can see it coming—that the American Pain Foundation, so concerned about veterans’ care, was essentially a front: it got nearly 90 percent of its funding from major pharmaceutical companies, including Purdue Pharma.”

“[…] while the American Pain Foundation assured the public that “the risk of addiction from opioid pain medication is very low.” In fact, the reverse is true. Opioid painkillers proved to be highly addictive, particularly in young people—say, for example, veterans of recent wars. There can be no doubt that the collusion between Big Pharma and the American Pain Foundation resulted in the death of countless veterans.”

“One third of the soldiers in the Army were on prescription medications in 2010, and nearly half of them—76,500—were on opioid painkillers.”

“Staff Sergeant Ortega and I talked a little about the long-term costs of America’s wars and the immense expense to the nation of lifelong health care—so much of it inadequate, or just wrong—for thousands of damaged vets.”

“They know that a clever person just needs to find the right racket to profit endlessly from America’s endless wars. So many do. That, too, has become the new normal.”

“One father is present in the group of 25, and three mothers. The rest are wives. The absence of husbands sends a powerful message: that real soldiers are men, and the job of reintegrating them falls almost exclusively to mothers, wives, and girlfriends.”

“Does he take no interest in the children? It’s that space again. His space is the all-purpose answer as the experts continue to move down the list, until they get to his demands for those “conjugal relations,” in which case the wife is to give him not his space but her body, even in some of the unfamiliar and painful ways he now seems determined to take it.”

“It cares that the wife is always cheerful, always keeping up her soldier’s morale, always giving him his space. It cares that she is always busy—teaching volunteer classes to newcomers on the basics of military life, teaching other wives to improve their attitudes, doing volunteer work for the Family Readiness Group on base almost as if she were getting paid for all her anxious labor, and always encouraging her soldier to reenlist.”

“[…] within the military, a bad attitude toward girls and women usually goes unremarked upon because it is the attitude of the military itself.”

“The national media occasionally try to connect the dots, the military never. Only after the ninth homicide at Fort Carson, did the Army start a local inquiry. The general in charge said they were “looking for a trend” among the homicidal soldiers. “Something that happened through their life cycle that might have contributed to this.” An Army prosecutor asked, “Where is this aggression coming from?””

“Sexual assault has become such a feature of daily life in the military that it earned an acronym of its own: MST, for Military Sexual Trauma. But like so many military terms, MST is a self-serving obfuscation. It uses the medical and psychological term “trauma,” which describes an effect of rape, to mask rape itself, which is clearly a crime. At the same time, by labeling criminal sexual assault “military,” it removes it from the realm of criminal prosecution to the shelter of the old boys’ network, the military chain of command.”

“This is an old problem precisely because the military has condoned it, whether the victims were women or men. One notorious serial rapist of men, Jeffrey Dahmer, who joined the Army in 1979, made a habit of beating and raping his 17-year-old room mate and at least one other soldier, as well. Honorably discharged, he went on in civilian life to rape, murder, and dismember at least 16 boys in Milwaukee. He had raped and murdered one boy before he enlisted, but in the military he didn’t have to murder his victims or refrain from raping them because nobody in the chain of command paid the slightest attention to their stories.”

“There’s the metaphor: the soldier with his perfectly silent uncomplaining woman beside him, giving him his space while he enjoyed the national game. He turned off the heat in the apartment in hopes of preserving his woman and making this idyll last. But there was the baby. After a week, the baby was “not looking good,” so Coleman smothered him, wrapped him in a sheet, packed him in a box, and placed it in the freezer. Some days later he put what was left of Jessica Hine in a suitcase and dumped it in the woods. Someone came across it and called the police, and then to the embarrassment of the innocent commanders at MacDill Air Force Base, the story began to come to light.”

“What provoked their greatest fury, however, was encountering Americans who rebuffed what they had to say, who willfully remained deaf to the truth they told about the war. Lifton acknowledged that while their rage could be “at times, painful and self-destructive,” it was “often appropriate and valuable.” It was, in effect, a demand that the guilt they endured be shared by the officials and citizens who had sent them to war. Their guilt was moral. Their rage became political.”

“A Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan told me that a VA therapist labeled her with PTSD though she had neither experienced nor complained of a traumatic event. Instead she had spoken of feeling “a kind of moral revulsion from life in the U.S. after seeing how people in the rest of the world live.”

“Many returned soldiers have that same feeling, coupled with a smoldering rage at having lost the lives that once, in their innocence, would have contented them—the family trips to Walmart, the Happy Meals at McDonald’s with all the kids. That’s a world they can’t fit into anymore because, as the Marine veteran said, “We’ve seen the price the world pays for ‘The American Way of Life.’””

“But rape, like battering, is about power, about exercising overwhelming control over the body and mind of another person against their will. The military is a man’s world, where women are needed in the absence of sufficient male volunteers, but not particularly welcome. The military inculcates a sense of male superiority over that despised creature, the girl. No soldier (male or female) must ever behave like a girl. Rape demonstrates that a male soldier can act like a real man and a warrior.”

“The soldier traumatized by seeing his friends blown to bits feels the horror of it and is helpless to save them. He may feel abandoned, yet guilty that he somehow survived. Rage, sorrow, grief, despair—he may feel them all, but he will know that this terrible act was done by the enemy. On the other hand, soldiers who have been raped—an estimated one in three women in the U.S. military, and tens of thousands of men, as well—go through it all: the horror, helplessness, fear, grief, and despair with the certain knowledge that this thing was done to them by comrades on purpose.”

“Most of them come from small towns in the South or the rustbelt of the Midwest or big city ghettoes. Many are following a family heritage of military service that has made veterans of past wars a relatively privileged class, enjoying special access to higher education, jobs, and a nationwide system of socialized medicine.”

“Tens of thousands of workers, recruited often with false promises of high wages in posh places like Dubai, paid high fees to recruiters only to find themselves in Iraq or Afghanistan, confined within bases, often stripped of their passports, with no recourse but to work for next to nothing.”

“A soldier can do a tour of duty with the Army or Marines and then, having been trained at taxpayer expense, ascend to the happy land where the same government will pay him many times his old salary for much easier work. And, hey, nobody needs to know his business.”

“The percentages shift as deployments change, making for slippery and often deceptive statistics. For example, the report noted that only 45,000 American troops were then left in Iraq, but it somehow neglected to mention that a shadow army of 64,250 private contractors still remained.”

“If you stop to think about it, these armies of men used to being accountable to no one, vulnerable to the pitch of any wacko extremist group, returning to an American homeland already armed and fearful—well, that could keep you up at night.”

“There may be a rare American, inside or outside military service, who can state with certainty what we now fight for, but when soldiers fight only because soldiers before them have fought, when soldiers die only because soldiers before them have died, then war truly becomes an endless loop.”

“[…] a familiar war narrative of selfless sacrifice that will be trumpeted in presidential rhetoric, Sunday sermons, and press releases from the Pentagon. Thanks to Hollywood we even know what war is supposed to look like, and how proud and patriotic it is supposed to make us feel.”

“[…] those kids who drank the recruiters’ Kool-Aid and died, and those who still bravely soldier on with their brand-new titanium legs and blasted genitals and decommissioned brains.”

“At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in 2011, I met a woman from a small town in West Virginia, the mother of a 19-year-old soldier whose legs and genitals were blasted to pulp in Afghanistan. She quit her job and moved to a motel near the hospital, then in Washington D.C., to care for him, while her husband worked a second job at home to make up for part of her lost wages. She had been at the hospital for six months. She hoped to bring her son home someday—perhaps in another year or so—and she expected to take care of him for the rest of his life, or hers. She said, “People expect me to be happy that he survived, and I believe I am, but I can’t really remember what happy feels like.””

““According to the DOJ [Department of Justice], more than 50 million Americans—twenty-nine percent of the adult population—have an arrest record. This number has doubled since a decade ago, meaning that young people and especially young men, the most likely to commit crimes and the most eagerly sought military recruits, have increasingly problematic criminal histories….”