Bergdahl’s Bitter Homecoming: The Psychological Cost of War [View all]

[DonViejo]

Jean Kim

According to reports, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has not yet contacted his family. That seems strange to most, but the reintegration process after war (and especially after capture) is anything but simple.

“It’s the children that I can’t forget.”

Time and time again, in my psychiatrist’s office at a military clinic, a soldier would tell me this. Strong, young, crisply uniformed, he or she would shake, sigh, stare blankly, or cry, recounting variations of this statement. The most painful traumas—be it seeing your best friends blown into body parts, losing limbs, brutally shot—was also seeing injured civilians, particularly, the children.

I heard stories about soldiers carrying a little girl who was severely burnt to the hospital, begging for her to be treated by the military providers even though they didn’t always have the resources to treat civilians. I heard about someone having to shoot a boy, out of fear he was rigged with a bomb trigger.

In Michael Hastings’ June 2012 Rolling Stone profile of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the author notes that perhaps the turning point in Bergdahl’s fateful disappearance was his witnessing a child being run over by an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle). Bergdahl wrote about the incident in a bitter final email to his father, shortly before his capture by the Taliban.

The death of a child ranks highest in our set of moral taboos and violations. Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov famously remarked that God’s salvation “is not worth the tears of that one tortured child,” one of the most powerful critiques of religion ever written. And for Bergdahl and other soldiers, the death of children casts any possible idealism or meaning behind their war mission into serious moral crisis. Are the deaths of the most innocent worth the devastation of the battlefield?

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/19/bergdahl-s-bitter-homecoming-the-psychological-cost-of-war.html