The New York Times published a special report today, announcing that it has uncovered 121 cases of homicides committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan (Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles). These cases are not tracked by the Pentagon nor by the Justice Department, and the veterans are prosecuted in civilian courts. The report states that 121 is likely a lower number than the actual number of killings by combat veterans, as not all cases are reported publicly or in detail.
The article opens with the disturbing story of Matthew Sepi, a 20 year old Iraq combat veteran who ventured out to a 7-Eleven one night to purchase alcohol to help him sleep. Not yet old enough to purchase alcohol legally, he paid someone to buy him beer. Living in a dangerous neighborhood and military-trained, Mathew was carrying a concealed AK-47, which he felt he needed for protection.
As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”
In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.
“Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried.
According to the New York Times, similar scenarios have played out in towns across the country in the last 7 years. The Times reports that the stress of deployment and the trauma of combat, combined with other factors such as alcohol and family problems, appear to “set the stage” for this type of violence when some veterans return to civilian life.
Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing.
More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings.
Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.
About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives.
A quarter of the victims were fellow service members.
The Times discovered an 89% increase in killings by veterans during the present wartime period, as compared to the six years before the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and reports that this “increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower”.
There is only one woman among the 121 offenders, and most of these veterans had no criminal history. In contrast, most civilians convicted of homicide have some criminal history.
Although the percentage of combat veterans who actually kill civilians upon their return home is extremely small, the report notes that these tragedies constitute a shadow or echo of the profound effects of untreated Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome that plague many, many veterans of the current war, and more commonly take the form of deepening debt, alcoholism, domestic abuse, etc.
In keeping with previous posts about military recruitment strategies that target minority and low-income youth, I think this report illustrates the toll that combat can take on a person, which is certainly *not* a part of the glamorous image the military portrays in its advertising campaigns. The Times also reported that few of these 121 received more than a cursory mental health screening before return to the civilian world, and quoted expert psychologists who maintain that PTSS is extremely treatable if properly diagnosed.
If the military doesn’t have a commitment to mental health screening and treatment for those who have served in the most trying and dangerous atmosphere that exists in our modern world, and for whom the challenges to re-assimilation are well-documented, who can argue that military service is a viable “choice” that youth with few opportunities would opt for even if, for example, they could afford colleg
