Big Pharma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): The Deadly Toll that Permanent War Takes on US Soldiers, Awaits the Rest of Us
By Joachim Hagopian
Global Research
January 24, 2015
Like pretty much all ailments and illnesses in the United States, returning soldiers from the warfronts suffering from acute cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are currently being treated, or more like snowed under, with powerful, mind-altering psychiatric drugs. Because it is unnatural for the vulnerable human psyche to witness the insanity of war, watching your buddies or yourself get blown up by IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices), instantly your life can forever be changed into a permanent living nightmare. Just by surviving the trauma after observing your brothers-in-arms (increasingly sisters-in arms with next year’s official US policy change deploying women into combat) or even witnessing any humans die in war will often plague combat veterans the rest of their lives as survivor’s guilt. Also as human tools of the US Empire killing machine, American soldiers in combat have systematically participated in war crime atrocities killing thousands and even millions of innocent civilians over the many decades of constant US war. Those soldiers who have not been desensitized and numbed to the extent that they cannot block out their survivor’s guilt nor their residual guilt from killing others in immoral wars or possibly committing war crimes themselves, virtually always end up scarred for life, burdened with the shame and remorse for what they perceive as their own never forgotten much less forgiven past sins.
My own father, a decorated Navy war hero on US submarines during World War II and Korea, was tortured by his post-war “sins” that he carried for over 70 years all the way to his grave. His particular war sins were the result of being forced at gunpoint by US naval command to comply with America’s racist war policy to kill every Asian man, woman and child in Pacific waters during World War II, even innocent non-Japanese civilian families peacefully eking out a modest living in their small fishing boats. At one point when my machine gunner father couldn’t bear committing any more of his racist nation’s sins, after defiantly throwing his .50 caliber bullet belt to the deck and retreating down below deck to his bunk, his submarine captain charged after him with his revolver drawn ready to murder my father until several of my father’s shipmates talked the raging Medal of Honor winning skipper out of it. For the next seven decades my father agonized over the haunting images of gunning down little children and their mothers laying lifeless in their slowly sinking boats, turning the Pacific blue red with white man’s inhumanity toward yellow race people. But this is what the last “justified,” red, white and blue American war did to my father’s fragile human psyche. Rather than placing the blame squarely on United States war policy in the Pacific theater, he always blamed himself for murdering those innocent families whose only crime was being born with slanted eyes. His PTSD symptoms persisted the next 70 years, countless times suddenly jarred awake in the middle of the night in cold sweat moaning in agony over his nightmares of those haunting, indelible images from so many years before. Then on weekends he would regularly put on his treasured “Victory At Sea” records, and the lilting music like a trance would morosely place him right back into reliving his war trauma, wrestling with his inner demons hundreds of times over while drowning himself in alcohol, futilely self-medicating numbness amidst his lingering, unshakable pain. This is what war does. From any end of the gun, war is always wrong.
Especially in recent years with the present war of terror raging as permanent official US foreign policy, military jargon has conveniently invented self-deceptive ways of distancing and separating individual and collective guilt by renaming murdered victims “collateral damage” as if inanimate objects that every seasoned soldier accepts as part of the human cost of war. Demonizing the enemy as some form of subhuman lowlife is another distorted, twisted way to avoid individual and national culpability and the so called trappings of guilt and shame. If the enemy is objectified and debased into pure evil, then one can be anointed a war hero, feeling good and even proud for removing such scum off the face of the earth. These are the insidious methods of mental madness adjustments that the national warring state indoctrinates, manipulates and infuses into its military warriors to become callous, unthinking, unfeeling killing machines. To become the best at waging war as a member of the USA’s most elite fighting force, a soldier typically trains to become a coveted Navy Seal, a Delta Force Commando or a member of the Special Forces. These men are some of the most skilled killers/murderers/assassins on the planet. The CIA and Joint Special Operations Forces busily fighting dirty little secret wars in more than 134 nations around the globe have honed and refined this killer instinct. Their deep brainwash allows them to live with themselves in the same way their Mafia hitmen counterparts can comfortably do what they do for a living without a tinge of guilt or remorse. “It’s just a job and somebody’s gotta do it.”
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