America: Teacher and Student of War

With the fall of the Twin Towers and the war going on in Iraq, we are becoming quite familiar with the psychological devastation front-line, war-like violence inflicts on the heart and mind. Soldiers are returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, reliving nightmares of the war in their sleep, committing suicide, living on medication and having difficulties adjusting to civilian life. These are normal psychological responses to extended exposure to conditions of war, because the human heart and mind were not created to efficiently process the screams and faces of terror and the human carnage that is prevalent in wartime situations. Merely witnessing such violence, let alone being the victim of it, cuts to the quick of humanity. No one is free from the suffering caused by these types of widespread, methodical dehumanizing acts. Though the victim usually suffers the physical and mental brunt of it, even a physically unscathed perpetrator can be left with psychological wounds of what he or she has done.

Our soldiers have served a certain period of time in the war and are getting discharged for mental disorders which have been caused by their war experiences. Our sympathy and compassion for our own soldiers who have been to war is great. We are concerned about them, we feel a sense of tragedy and pain for them, especially when a soldier kills himself due to the anguish of his war experiences. We want to love them and make their nightmares go away, we want to praise them and honor them for their sacrifices. We don’t blame them for the things they do in this state of post-traumatic stress, or for the unthinkable things they may have done to other humans in the war. We can feel their pain, intellectually if not emotionally understand their suffering, and forgive any war atrocities they may have carried out against civilians.

If war-like events have this effect on the perpetrators of these acts, can you imagine what psychological effects the acts have on those to whom they are done? If willfully carrying out these acts and being a party to a war is so devastating to our soldiers, can you imagine how psychologically devastating actually living in the war is for those who are not even fighting in it? They suffer the entire war, not a period of it. Their homes and their families, their friends and their livelihoods, their entire lives as they know them are destroyed. They don’t get to leave their country and go home to security, to a safe house with a loving family waiting for them, supporting them. Their home and their workplace may now be rubble and dust. Their family members and/or neighbors may already be dead or in hospital. Every aspect of their lives is in perpetual, violent upheaval and chaos.

We don’t have much compassion or sympathy for the civilians of our wars, even though we may have taken it upon ourselves to start a war in their homeland and we are thus the source of their dehumanization and suffering. We don’t care about them the way we care about our soldiers or our homeland, because we have security and have always had security, because they’re so far away from us, because we don’t give any thought to how they are suffering at our hands, because the people running our media make sure we don’t find out what is really happening to them in our name, or simply because they are Arabs and Muslims; simply, they are not us.

Expanding Our Understanding

In this day and age, this way of thinking is primitive and outdated, because sound logic and abundant experience tells us that this backward, fear-based way of thinking and reacting perpetuates war and the very fear and insecure feeling that we are struggling to free ourselves from. This way of thinking is ultimately a vicious circle of death, destruction and suffering for all parties. We should think of post-traumatic stress disorder in all war-like contexts, not just in the context of our own war veterans. If we expand our understanding for our emotionally war-torn soldiers, we can identify a likely cause for the emergence of a terrorist. After all, a terrorist is ultimately an individual person who appears to have lost all sense of value for human life, including his own.

Let’s consider our affection and concern for a U.S. soldier returning from Iraq and how he continues to suffer and requires medication to live in civilian life as a result of his dehumanizing experiences from just a few years of war. Now let’s take the understanding and compassion we have for our soldier and transfer it to a person we don’t know who lives far away in a culture we aren’t so familiar with. This person has experienced far more numerous traumatizing events than our American soldier who we empathize with. This far-away person has lived in a war zone, with death imminent around him at every corner, tanks blocking his way to school, blocking the road to workplaces so people can’t work, he witnesses or hears of daily killings, sometimes mass killings of the people around him, people he is close to, people he knows. His life is full of death and destruction. What our American soldier experienced and witnessed was only a flash in the pan, a moment in the grand scheme of his life, and he experienced these things more-or-less as an adult. The person we are focusing on is much younger, maybe 10 or 12, and war was not a finite event for him, but his entire life. This young boy’s past, present, and most likely his future exists in the sort of circumstances that have brought many American soldiers to the point of suicide after just a few years. What would our American soldiers become if they were born into or had lived permanently in these circumstances?

Can we now have understanding for how psychologically devastating a state of war is on an adult human being, a child or young teenager, who is not even participating in the war, but living in it? And even more-so, how emotionally and psychologically devastating a war environment is to those who spend their whole lives living and growing up in war?

The Vicious Circle

The truth is, that when any human being is subject over an extended period of time to an environment of gratuitous and random killing and violence, such as circumstances of war in the Middle East, he or she learns automatically by example that human life, be it his or her life or someone else’s, has no value. People who’ve lived extended periods of time and have grown up in war zones see the world through different eyes than we do. They have so intensely been the target of the blackest emotions known to man for so long, that they can no longer feel the tragedy of their own or others’ situations, as our soldiers do; rather they have become desensitized to death. This is because their own life and the lives of every person they know is precariously teetering on the edge of violent death, at the whims of military powers and heavily armed foreign soldiers they have no control over. They live knowing that any moment they or a loved one may be killed. The taking of human lives (=friends, family, acquaintances, one’s own life) in the most violent ways imaginable, literally with their blood and guts spattered everywhere, as a matter of daily life, teaches, at the very least, that taking someone’s life, or your own, is fair, acceptable and a normal part of daily life and it moreover conveys the fact that “we, as humans, don’t preserve or value life,” so it’s o.k., and moreover commonplace, to blow someone else’s body, or your own, to bits. Thus the victim of the violence learns the lesson of war from the perpetrator. This then becomes a vicious circle, like a serpent eating its own tail.

Conclusion

The fall of the Twin Towers should have at least given us a glimpse into what it would be like to be a civilian in one of the countries hosting our wars. It enabled us to momentarily feel war, devastation, death, destruction and loss for a day, but not every single day and not as a matter of existence. Our soldiers, now coming home with nightmares of guilt from what they did, or haunted by visions of carnage, are giving us yet another glimpse of what war is really like on the front line, in someone else’s homeland, and a window of opportunity for us to open our eyes to the plight we are creating for those our media and politicians are programming us to hate and fear. Hopefully our suffering soldiers will be the inspiration for the emergence in us of some compassion and understanding for the people so far away on the other side of the vast Atlantic. Hopefully the stories our soldiers tell will open our eyes to the possibility that the monsters we perceive ourselves to be fighting are really traumatized human-beings, just like our soldiers, who have been suffering the full extent of wars, of our wars against them, too intensely for too long. If we open our eyes and look at life beyond our own backyards, we will see, as the cycle of war comes full circle, that, ultimately, we become the students of our own violent lessons.