Michael Ware on Sgt. Robert Bales, Accused of Killing Afghan Civilians

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/20/michael-ware-on-sgt-robert-bales-accused-of-killing-afghan-civilians.html

Michael Ware on Sgt. Robert Bales, Accused of Killing Afghan Civilians
Mar 20, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

A week after the U.S. soldier’s alleged massacre, there is still no answer to the “why” of this abomination. But war correspondent Michael Ware says after all the tours Sgt. Bales endured, he must have some form of PTSD—and a terrible void within.

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Since 9/11, more than 107,000 soldiers have completed three or more combat tours, and studies show that up to about 30 percent of combat vets returning home report some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. As a sufferer myself, I find it hard to believe that Sgt. Bales, after all the tours he’s endured, would not have some form of PTSD. But even if that is so, that alone is not any kind of explanation.

It was a Medal of Honor winner from Vietnam who said that given what we must see in war, given what soldiers must do, one would have to be almost a sociopath for these things not to touch you, irrevocably, for the rest of your life. The killing of the Iraqi grandmother is one, but not the worst or most haunting, in my accumulation of horrors from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While our troops go out of their way, even adding great risk to their own lives to prevent it, the killing of civilians does still happen. Many of us who have experienced the fighting over these long years have seen it for ourselves—be it from the lighting up of errant vehicles at checkpoints, or tossing grenades into structures to silence a well-used weapon, or from the ubiquitously named collateral damage when we drop our bombs or are forced to blast our way out of ambush killing zones.

People may come to be seen as chattel, once you’ve stepped over enough body parts, picked up enough dying mates, and embraced that mind-set required to be purveyors of death in foreign lands. In that odiously dark place where our young men have to go in their heads to endure and survive and carry out the ugly deeds demanded of them in combat, these things must take their seat. Human life comes to hold both a greater and a lesser value than it might hold in a peaceful civilian world.

It’s taken me a full, sleepless week to pen this since first hearing of the shootings in Panjwai; all this time turn that image of the shooter in my head, to fathom anything of my reaction to it. There is still no answer to the “why” of this abomination. But a beating heart must, by human necessity, assume he is possessed of a terrible and consuming emptiness within. If his guilt is true, his soul must surely be a dark, lightless place.