KIA in Alabama
- From: alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Alan)
- Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:44 +0000 (GMT Standard Time)
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0121-29.htm
by Stan Goff
"All is not okay or right for those of us who return home alive and
supposedly well. What looks like normalcy and readjustment is only an illusion
to be revealed by time and torment. Some soldiers come home missing limbs and
other parts of their bodies. Still others will live with permanent scars from
horrific events that no one other than those who served will ever understand."
-- Douglas Barber, 2005
On January 16th, after having talked quite normally on the phone with at least
two other people that same day, Douglas Barber, a member of Iraq Veterans
Against the War (IVAW) living in Lee County, Alabama, changed the answer-message
on his telephone.
"If you're looking for Doug," it said in his Alabama drawl, "I'm checking out of
this world. I'll see you on the other side."
He then called the police, collected his shotgun, and went out onto his porch to
meet them. From the sketchy reports we have now, it seems the police wouldn't
oblige him with a "suicide by cop" and tried to talk him down. When it became
apparent he wasn't able to commit cop-suicide, 37-year-old Douglas Barber did an
about face, rotated the shotgun and killed himself.
There is a hell of a lot that we just don't know about how this happened. I
talked to Doug on the phone earlier this month, and he described how excited he
was to have joined IVAW, how he looked forward to taking up the pen and speaking
out. Others had spoken with him only days and hours before he permanently
quieted the chaos in his head. None of the "classic" signs of suicidal thinking
were manifest. He was gregarious and upbeat, playful.
We know he had been prescribed medication. When he came back from Iraq, having
served with the 1485th Transportation Company, a National Guard unit federalized
to compensate for the extreme combat overstretch in Iraq, he was diagnosed with
severe post-tramatic stress (PTSD), and the Veterans Administration medical
system leans toward drugs. In fact, they frequently shazam PTSD into something
called "personality disorder," which can be treated with drugs. One veteran I
know was prescribed Paxil which made him feel suicidal, and when the VA insisted
that it worked, this kid switched to his own anti-depressant -- marijuana, which
he says works better than the Paxil and doesn't make him feel like killing
himself.
If one has a personality disorder, you see, then the "pathology" has no relation
to one's job, like participating in the occupation of Iraq. The etiology exists
somewhere within the individual, like a genetic disorder... that was missed
during induction, missed by one's units, and missed during medical
pre-screeening for deployment into Mesopotamia.
We don't know if Doug was taking medication, or had stopped taking medication,
or even what medication he had been prescribed.
We do know that he was a truck driver, and that his job in Iraq was driving
supply convoys along the shooting gallery between Baghdad Airport and LSA
Anaconda in Balad -- a giant military base -- a veritable city -- that is
subject to so many mortar and rocket attacks that the troops have renamed it
Mortaritaville. We do know, from Doug's interviews, that the stress of those
convoys -- each confronting its participants with the possibility that this
could be one's last road trip -- were hard on Doug. In July 2003, his convoy was
hit with an improvised explosive device, and the mortar attacks at Anaconda were
so regular that they were alomst a weather pattern. But Doug said there was
something else that was even harder on him. When the grunts came in, they would
describe how many civilians they'd killed.
When Doug was in a traffic jam one day, feeling very vulnerable, and the US
units dismounted to clear the traffic jam -- angry and afraid and waving weapons
at the civilians -- a woman in a bus held up her baby for them to see... like
that window-sign we see in cars on American highways -- "Baby on Board." Only
she wasn't cautioning other drivers to be careful. She was trying to prevent an
armed attack that could kill her child.
Doug may have decomped from medication, I don't know. That could have
contributed to his suicide. It's possible. He fought with the defunded,
Bush-administration VA for two years trying to get counselling, and trying to
get authorization for his disability. It's very difficult to be a "productive
member of society" when one fears sleep, and when one has lost meaning.
I read a book on post-traumatic stress once. Rape is the most common cause, then
combat. It said that trauma disrupts one's sense that the word is a safe place,
that trauma destabilizes our sense of meaning.
Let me explain something, as a veteran myself of eight conflict areas, and
something that Doug discovered in Balad. The sense that the world is not a safe
place is not a "disorder." It is an accurate perception. And the sense of
meaning many of us enjoy is an illusion, a cruel construction that normalizes
the orderly activity of the suburb and nurses our children on simple-minded,
Disney-fied optimism pumped through television sets in a relentless datastream.
Post-traumatic stress is not a disorder. Calling it that earns it a place in the
DSM IV, professionalizes and medicalizes this very accurate perception that the
world is not safe, and that life is not a comforting film convention. Calling it
an individual "disorder" cloaks the social systems responsible for experiences
like Vietnam and Iraq. And it renders invisible the fact that Douglas Barber was
not merely a suicide.
Douglas Barber was nurtured on the illusions that secure our obedience, but when
the real system needed to demonstrate to the rest of the world just how unsafe
our nation could make them as the price of disobedience, the vile carnival
barkers of the Bush administration, like administrations before them, did not
recruit the children of Martha's Vineyard or Georgetown. They went, as they have
always done, to places like Lee County, Alabama, where simple people have formed
powerful affective attachments to the myth of our national moral superiority.
When that wordview, that architecture of meaning, collapses in the face of
realities like convoy Russian roulette, and women holding babies up to prevent
being shot, and daily stories of slaughter by the people one sleeps with, the
profound betrayal of it is not experienced as some quiet, somber sadness. It is
experienced like bees swarming out of a hive that has been broken, as a howling
chaos. So we quiet it with marijauna, alcohol, heroin, and even shotguns.
The most fortunate of these survivors find one another. Doug had recently joined
IVAW, where our veterans not only establish mutual support networks of plain
love and care with one another, but where they can engage in the most
"therapeutic" activity of all -- fighting back against the criminality that sent
them there in the first place. We arrived too late for Doug. We were going to
met him in Birmingham later this month to involve him in the planning for a
veteran-led march from Mobile, Alabama to New Orleans, and serve as the
conscience of a nation that will spend trillions to drop bombs on Iraqis, and
use a hurricane in the Black Belt as a pretext to accelerate gentification.
So when we launch out of Mobile in March on this 135-mile trek, we will carry
Douglas Barber with us.
Stan Goff is a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. He is the author of three
books; "Hideous Dream - A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft
Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder - The Military in the New American
Century" (Soft Skull Press, 2004), and "Sex & War" (Soft Skull Press, 2006 [to
be released soon]). He is a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW),
Veterans for Peace (VFP), and Military Families Speak Out (MFSO). His son is in
the active duty army and is in Iraq now for the third time. Goff is on the
coordinating committee of the Bring Them Home Now! campaign, and advises Iraq
Veterans Against the War (IVAW) on organizational development. His blog is
called "Feral Scholar." http://www.stangoff.com/
© 2006 The Huffington Post
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0121-29.htm
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
Nemesis Peace Centre
http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/protector.html
Abuse of Women and Children
http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/
Nemesis News
http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/
Absolute Anarchy
http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/
.
- Prev by Date: OT - U.S. Obtains Internet Users' Search Records
- Next by Date: Elaina encounters white privilege
- Previous by thread: OT - U.S. Obtains Internet Users' Search Records
- Next by thread: Elaina encounters white privilege
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
