It used to be said of slavery that the master was a slave as well, to his need for slaves. In the same way, there are many victims of torture — and one of them is the torturer.
Sometimes the torturer is already cruel — with a childhood spent
blowing up frogs, for example. But often the torturer is just a kid who joined the army, went through training, and got sent to hell. After a while, you do what others are doing, and what you're ordered to do. Then you go home — and deal with your memories and your guilt for the rest of your life, however long or short.
Over at
Harpers, Scott Horton has a six-question interview with Joshua Phillips, author of a book on the subject, the appropriately named
None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture. From the Amazon book description: 'The legacy of torture in the “War on Terror,” told through the story of one tank battalion.'
A taste (my emphasis):
2. Much of your narrative focuses on two soldiers from the same unit, Adam Gray and Jonathan Millantz, both of whom died under tragic circumstances after returning home. What are the common strands of these two stories?
Gray and Millantz were very different people. Gray was planning to be career military; Millantz was a combat medic who left shortly after his tour in Iraq ended, and joined the anti-war movement. While both soldiers had other traumatic experiences during their combat tour in Iraq, they also admitted that their involvement with prisoner abuse deeply troubled them. Millantz told me he felt Gray was distraught over the abuse he had been involved in, and believed that it partly led to his tragic demise. Millantz was also haunted by his own history with prisoner abuse—not just because of what he saw and participated in, but because of his inability to stop it. He and his family considered that experience to have been especially traumatic for him, and it partly explains his involvement in the anti-war movement. I interviewed other whistle-blowers who were also distressed by their inability to effectively report prisoner abuse, and some felt they had been disregarded, even discarded, by the military they served.
Both Gray and Millantz had strikingly similar experiences when they returned home. Both had violent outbursts, were involved in serious substance abuse, and spiraled into depression. Their families said that the military medical care and VA systems did not provide them with adequate mental health treatment, and often substituted drug treatment for therapeutic care.
Gray and Millantz each committed suicide after returning home.
The interview ranges from checkpoint experiences, to the role of popular culture, to the way torture techniques "evolve" spontaneously at locations where prisoners are abused, as soldiers put into practice things they had heard of, seen elsewhere, or experienced during their own training. The six-question format makes a good tight read.
There are many ways we're torturing ourselves with these practices — from the damage done to the Constitution, to the damage to the so-called "healing" profession by military psychologists and contractors, to the trauma of the soldiers themselves, many just men and women looking for work, or looking genuinely to serve. Check out
the interview, and if you like, check out
the book as well.
GP
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