EVERY GENERATION

Roger Ebert, in explaining the stylistic differences between the films 2001 and 2010 (and in explaining why the former was a better film than the latter), stated in his review of the latter, "Every decade gets the film it deserves."

Substitute the word film for any number of cultural signifiers - "food," "music," "clothes," and so on, and Ebert's aphorism still holds true; our lives are defined, as a great wizard once said, by the choices we make, and, as others, both great and small have said by the "choices" imposed upon us from on high.

So, how sad - and I am trying to say this without any sense of mopey, disaffected irony or sarcasm that passes for conversation skills or insight for people of my generation - not that most such people even understand what "mopey," "disaffected," "irony," or "sarcasm" mean (I'm not sure if I understand the terms, but I understand when someone is trying to strike a pose) - it is for me to observe that every generation gets the military it deserves.

Or, more accurately, as the latter part of the Ebert equation (the "imposition" part) suggests, gets the military that is imposed on it.

After the Vietnam War, many veterans (the ones who didn't kill themselves - the ones that conservatives call "the lucky ones" - not that the conservatives want anything to do with these folks, given that the majority of them were/are black/poor/have experienced actual combat - which leads me to another point - to the extent that conservatives have no affinity for such people, how would conservatives know what statements/media reporting "hurts troop morale?") displayed a pattern of unique, distinct psychological behavior - behavior that the mental health industry had not yet classified, let alone observed. Soon, a name was given to this pattern of behavior: "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" - a sustained psychological trauma inflicted by experiencing an horrific event, such as a near-death situation, a rape, killing someone, and so forth.

The Armed Forces, following the country itself as America finally realized that mental illness existed and was more than a punchline of a stale opening act at a Republican fundraiser, since the draft officially ended in 1973, has required all applicants/volunteers to undergo some form of mental health screening. The type of screening has changed to reflect innovations in mental health science. Until a few years ago, one could be safely assured that if he or she were on a medication regime of several or more anti-depressant or other antipsychotic agents, for the purposes of treating two or more major, treatment-resistant, refractory, psychological disorders, he or she would not be taken by the Armed Forces, no matter how hard he/she pleaded to be taken (it went without saying that such a person would not be drafted, either, given that one of the main reasons the draft ended was that the Armed Forces found out that drafting the average teenager off the street posed, eventually, huge disciplinary problems, among other things; imagine the problems a severely mentally ill recruit would pose!)

Now, of course, times are different. Our Armed Forces are stretched beyond the breaking point, for obvious reasons. People with (gasp!) tattoos are being taken, as are people who are high school dropouts and people with criminal records. Even under the current Administration, I have a strange sense that some people have "told" and still have been allowed to serve (perhaps in exchange for being tortured into reminding them of the consequences of "telling" anyone else). Yet the following story, which hardly surprises me, shows just how far the Armed Forces has gone to get its hands on anyone and everyone, even with its backdoor draft of reservists, rape of stop/loss policies, and other policies designed to take the few, the chosen, the flotsam:

Report: Mentally ill troops forced into combat
Military not following own rules on deployment, paper says


Saturday, May 13, 2006; Posted: 10:05 p.m. EDT (02:05 GMT)


HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) -- U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported in its Sunday editions.
The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.
In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. The newspaper, citing Pentagon statistics, said fewer than 1 in 300 service members were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October 2005.
Twenty-two U.S. troops committed suicide in Iraq last year. That number accounts for nearly one in five of all noncombat deaths and was the highest suicide rate since the war started, the newspaper said.
The paper reported that some service members who committed suicide in 2004 or 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for "extended deployments."
Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said.
"I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal," said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a New York-based advocacy group. "You're creating chemically activated time bombs."
Commanders, not medical professionals, have final say over whether a troubled soldier is retained in a war zone. Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top mental health expert, and other military officials said they believe most commanders are alert to mental health problems and are open to referring troubled soldiers for treatment.
Ritchie acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.
"The challenge for us ... is that the Army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge," she said. "And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers' personal needs."
Ritchie insisted the military works hard to prevent suicides, but it is a challenge because every soldier has access to a weapon.
"I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country," said Arthur S. Blank Jr., a Yale-trained psychiatrist who helped get post-traumatic stress disorder recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War.
Maj. Andrew Efaw, a judge advocate general officer in the Army Reserves who handled trial defenses for soldiers in northern Iraq last year, said commanders don't want to send mentally ill soldiers into combat.
"But on the other hand, [the commander] doesn't want to send a message to his troops that if you act up, he's willing to send you home," Efaw said.
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So that's what displaying symptoms of a mental illness is - "acting up." The systematic rapes that occurred in the Tailhook scandals and have been committed by hundreds of others of sailors in every port - what is this "acting up" called? Assault with a friendly weapon? Please. Apparently, one can have one's term of service reduced more easily by "acting up in this manner" - and can do so "honorably" - than one can get discharged by dint of having an illness that should have made him ineligible for service in the first place.

We truly do have a military that is a product of our times - untrained, unprepared, vulnerable, clueless, mentally deficient and mentally ill - and above all, one that does not know when enough is enough. The only difference between our country and the military is that some of the adjectives that describe the military - i.e. vulnerable - do not reflect or imply culpability on the part of our troops, whereas the nation collectively is at fault for being vulnerable. But our vulnerability causes theirs. So, it is all related.

There is a line Doctor McCoy uttered to Admiral Kirk as Kirk pondered whether to leave his desk job at Starfleet Academy to once again serve as commanding officer of the Enterprise. McCoy was in Kirk's apartment, glazing over Kirk's antique collection, as he told the Admiral, "I'm your doctor, and I'm your friend. Get back your command. Get it back before you become part of this collection. Before you really do grow old."

One wonders whether we have any commanders with enough sense and know-how left that are able and willing to serve as our military's state-of-the-art sclerosis described above makes it ever more a collection - something to be looked at, stared at, perhaps even feared from a distance, but something that, once touched, once engaged, reveals the antiquity and chaos within.