A few bits and pieces about that video and the suicide of Daniel Somers:
(1) According to that asstastic MSM article, 70% of veteran suicides are 50+. That's not Gen X or indeed Gen Y. Summers is actually an outlier, he's more than 20 years too young on the averages. Which wars did all these late Baby Boomers fight in that caused them PTSD? Desert Storm, 100 hours of bombing in essence?
(2) What area did Somers serve in? It's not mentioned in the video, but Wikipedia tells us he was in the National Guard, then uplifted to Iraq where he served in something called the Tactical Human Intelligence Team. Given he is said to have served "over 400 combat missions" and was eligible for two Purple Hearts, the odds are he was part of a bust-down-fucking-doors team designed to scare the fuck out of the local populace. I say that because this, too, would be out of the ordinary: the studies indicate pretty clearly that PTSD hits hardest and with most prevalence in rear areas like artillery or support, not, as you'd think, in frontline infantry.
This is not me making this shit up, fucking Sebastian Junger himself in his book
War sets it out plain and simple:
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The Navy study compared stress levels of the pilots [who have to land on tiny aircraft carrier landing strips] to that of their radar intercept officers, who sat immediately behind them but had no control over the two-man aircraft. The experiment involved taking [cortisol] samples of both men on no-mission days as well as immediately after carrier landings... Radar intercept officers lived day-to-day with higher levels of stress -- possibly due to the fact that their fate was in someone else's hands -- but on mission days the pilots' stress levels were far higher. The huge responsibility borne by the pilots gave them an ease of mind on their days off that they paid for when actually landing the plane.
The study was duplicated in 1966 with a twelve-man Special Forces team in an isolated camp near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam... There was a serious possibility that the base would be overrun, in which case it was generally accepted that it would be "every man for himself." The two officers saw their cortisol levels climb steadily until the day of the expected attack and then diminish as it failed to materialize. Among the enlisted men, however, the stress levels were exactly the opposite: their cortisol levels dropped as the attack drew near, and then started to rise when it became clear that they weren't going to get hit... "The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-reliance, often to the point of omnipotence," they wrote. "These subjects were action-oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension."
Specifically, the men strung C-wire and laid additional mines around the perimeter of the base. It was something they knew how to do and were good at, and the very act of doing it calmed their nerves. In a way that few civilians could understand, they were more at ease facing a known threat than languishing in the tropical heat facing an unknown one.
I'd also add Nassim Taleb's insights on volatility to this: Navy pilots had a variance in their stress - high on mission days, low on non-mission days. Radar operators did not, the stress was constant - and human beings are not built to deal with chronic, continual stress.
Action according to logic or training also can be empowering even if it itself purposeless. The illusion of control over your circumstances too, as Junger goes on to mention:
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The division between those who feel in control of their fate and those who don't can occur even within the same close-knit group. During World War II, British and American bomber crews experienced casualty rates as high as 70 percent over the course of their tour; they effectively flew missions until they were killed. On those planes, pilots reported experiencing less fear than their turret gunners, who were crucial to operations but had no direct control over the aircraft. Fighter pilots, who suffered casualty rates almost as high as bomber crews, nevertheless reported extremely low levels of fear. They were both highly trained and entirely in control of their own fate, and that allowed them to ignore the statistical reality that they had only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving their tour.
That aside, it's the sections of his suicide note that are telling in this. I'll highlight the important parts:
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The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from.... To force me to do these things and then participate in the ensuing coverup is more than any government has the right to demand. Then, the same government has turned around and abandoned me....
Is it any wonder then that the latest figures show 22 veterans killing themselves each day? That is more veterans than children killed at Sandy Hook, every single day.... And for what? Bush's religious lunacy? Cheney's ever growing fortune and that of his corporate friends? Is this what we destroy lives for?...
The fact is that any kind of ordinary life is an insult to those who died at my hand. How can I possibly go around like everyone else while the widows and orphans I created continue to struggle? If they could see me sitting here in suburbia, in my comfortable home working on some music project they would be outraged, and rightfully so....
[N]ow I am free. I feel no more pain. I have no more nightmares or flashbacks or hallucinations. I am no longer constantly depressed or afraid or worried.
I am free.
What's the common factor to all of those quotations?
The focus on self
to the exception of all else. The inability to see one's self as insignificant and just part of the machine, which was something the armed forces didn't have to work on that much in previous wars because men already knew that lesson from brutal reality and the essential random nature of life. The need to get away from one's ordinary life.
Above all, the need to feel like one is in control, that one is the protagonist of one's own movie.
The Last Psychiatrist on this, and it is worth reading it very clearly and understanding its implications for this case and indeed for the entire Western military:
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Marshall McLuhan once said, "if everything around you is a nail, then get a really strong hammer." So the psychodynamic hammer: if narcissism is the exertion of will towards the maintenance of ego-- trying to get everyone to see you the way you want to be seen, and to get them to act the way you need them to act-- then a narcissistic injury would be the discovery of the limitations of your own power.
If the Americanized culture of the past two generations has deliberately encouraged narcissism as a positive personality structure, then we can expect higher rates of PTSD than in WWII not because the physical stresses are more severe-- in fact, they are most often less severe-- but because the discovery of the limitations of our own power shock us more deeply than it shocked them.
Typically, avoidance and flashbacks are the proxies for the diagnosis of PTSD, but these are drawn from experience with soldiers from a different time and a different culture. Today, the primary symptom of a traumatic reaction to the discovery of powerlessness wouldn't be fear but rage. Hence, new onset domestic violence is more sensitive than nightmares. "Being there" (suddenly staring off into the distance) more specific than reliving the traumatic event.
It follows that a PTSD soldier at home would be much less traumatized by a terrible car accident than by the suspicion that his wife is cheating.
I'm not saying soldiers are narcissists; but that's the culture we were taught from the day of our birth. The military should have made an effort to understand the psychic vulnerabilities of the culture it was recruiting from, and adjusted its training to anticipate those vulnerabilities.
More broadly, a nation that chooses to go to war-- for good reasons or bad-- should train its population to be more selfless, to establish as obvious that each person is merely part of a far more important whole, and to incentivize displays of that thinking with explicit rewards.
If it cannot do this, if it can't institutionalize this, it shouldn't go to war, most practically because it will not win.
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I wasn't so young 30 years ago that I shouldn't have known better.
After Vader tells Luke he is his father, he implores Luke to join him, "together we can rule the galaxy!" etc.
I remember thinking, why doesn't Luke just lie? Why doesn't he just pretend to join Vader, and then light saber him in the head or poison his rebreather later on? Instead, he jumps like a Stoic.
Short term yes, long term no. Turns out Lucas/Campbell was right and I was wrong. In extreme scenarios, for example torture or being a prisoner of war, lying and pretending gives short term gain but accelerates your mental breakdown. People who have survived have done so not by toughing it out-- me vs. you-- but focusing on something they considered more important than their own survival. "This hurts, but it's far better than bowing down to them."
In the language of learned helplessness: there is a vicarious learning in watching yourself apparently break down and give them what they want. Furthermore, it reveals the limits of your power: I had no other options but acquiescence.
The military's immediate problem is that this advice must now be learned in adulthood; there hasn't been 20 years of practice. It is not reflexive; narcissism is. I hope it requires no elaboration that the people we are currently fighting have exactly the opposite circumstance.
Many of the solutions propose themselves, but with respect to the military, and any organization that rises or falls on the tenacity and relentlessness of its members, Lord Moran offers this generally unpalatable perspective:
Leadership only concerns me when it hastens or delays the using up of a soldier's will power. But discipline runs through this part of my book like an undertone. Men are everywhere demanding whether a discipline which was designed for the illiterate is still suitable for an army with considerable number of thinking men in its ranks. I have turned over in my mind whether it is possible to relax that discipline without impairing a soldier's efficiency as a fighting man, and I can only find one answer...
The answer is no.
Somers, in short, thought too much, and did so only because he was raised by a narcissistic generation to think that way. It's all very noble to think you can be a moral, thinking soldier, but the psychological reality indicates pretty clearly otherwise. Because with the arrogance of presuming that you can be a moral soldier comes the crippling fact that you have very little power to actually act on your morals, the simple rationalisation that you are not the main character in your own movie. This is one of the most potent reasons why many WW2 veterans protested they were just doing their jobs when they were accused/lauded for their murder/heroism (depending on who won.) They might not have understood it, but that was a potent psychological tool for getting through the conflict - the comforting belief that you are just one cog in a larger machine.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm
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