Printed in the US by Maple Vail
Contents
2. The Story Begins in Afghanistan
3. “We weren’t in the CIA—we were soldiers”
5. Rumors, Myths, and Ticking Bomb Stories
8. Confronting Torture’s Legacy
Foreword
By Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD
The torture and the degradation of captives (we now call them “detainees”) strengthens the enemy and can cause trauma capable of disabling our own service members. This excellent book by Joshua Phillips documents this terrible truth.
Rather than being an effective military tool and a means to protect service members from enemy action, abuse (such as torture) and related atrocities are a mug’s game, a lose–lose “value proposition” for the nation.
Positive leadership at all levels is essential to prevent abusive violence. Such leadership means vigilantly preventing abuse and atrocities, and pursuing prompt, vigorous, and truthful followup of any abuse reports coming up the chain of command. This is the biggest forgotten lesson of the Vietnam War, one which slipped our minds during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF-OIF). As a direct consequence, we suffered the greatest strategic defeat in our history—Abu Ghraib—a defeat that was entirely self-inflicted.1
The late Colonel Carl Bernard was a retired Army infantry officer, who fought in both Korea as an infantry lieutenant in Task Force Smith and also in Vietnam. During part of his time in Vietnam, he was a province senior advisor in the Mekong Delta. On May 10, 2001, he wrote this to me in an email:
How little Americans knew about the “Peoples’ War” that … the rest of us were in. Simply stated, we did not know how to fight such a conflict at its beginning, and we learned very little during its course, in significant part because of the constant transfer of personnel. I was damned unkind … in restricting the activities of the SEAL team in Vinh Binh [Barnard’s province] … As I told them in some dudgeon, their activities were sustaining the Viet Cong’s recruiting effort even better than the Air Force’s activities.2
When the enemy can provoke us to respond atrociously, indiscriminately, or massively against the civilian population, we fail. Turning to torture means losing local cooperation and recruits fresh enemies who, in turn, target our own service members.
In the end, every atrocity potentially disables the service member who commits it. When I say this, I do not refer to the distant future when the soldier in question may well be a haunted, guilt-ridden veteran. My point to military forces today is that this service member can be traumatized and lost today. Sober and responsible troop leaders and trainers are concerned about the prevention of psychological and moral injury as a readiness issue.3 These military leaders cannot be dismissively branded as “politically correct.” An injured service member is lost to the force, whether the injury is physical or psychological.
I intentionally do not address here what most people would call the moral argument: the harm to innocents. As important as this is, there are other elements of torture’s harm to those inflicting it that are often overlooked, but those have already been carefully assembled within this book. Abusive (non-military) violence in war is a potent source of domestic violence, post-combat criminal behavior, and disabling psychological injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).4 Abusive violence contributes to long-term damage to veterans, their families, and their communities.
A perennial weed in the folk culture, sprouting sometimes even at high levels of military command and civilian leadership, is the idea that we need to respond to our enemies with tactics that are at least equally, if not more, horrific than the ones they have used against us. One way I have heard this folk belief expressed is: “If we kill their parents and children, the enemy will get the message, and won’t fuck with us.” With interrogation, the equivalent folk belief is: If you are not getting what you believe your detainees have in the way of “actionable intelligence,” it’s because you have not applied enough violent coercive “pressure.” Neither high military rank nor civilian authority confers immunity to this destructive illusion.
The overwhelming majority of people who volunteer for our armed forces are not psychopaths; they are good people who would be damaged were they to live with the knowledge that they had applied torture or committed murder. The distinction between lawful combatant (who may be legally and morally attacked) and protected person is the bright line between soldier and murderer. You do not “support our servicemen” by mocking the Law of Land Warfare5 and calling it a joke. Francis Lieber’s “Instructions for the Armies of the United States” (1863) expressed what I believe to be the continuing consensus of serious military professionals: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.”6 Even tough-guy gunslingers in the ground forces, and all those whose ideals include “supporting our troops,” have good reason, based on national self-interest, to respect and support the “rules of war.” Those who claim “there are no rules” fail to support the troops patriotically. Furthermore, those who hawkishly advocate torture (sometimes called “harsh interrogation techniques” or “coercive interrogation”) should think again about the adverse impact of participation in torture on our military forces. The toxic legacy of torture during the “war on terror” is starkly articulated in this book.
The “purity of arms”—all arms and all Military Occupation Specialties (MOS) and all actual tasks service members are assigned to do, regardless of their MOS—is something we do for ourselves to win fights and remain whole.
Jonathan Shay is a retired VA psychiatrist and is the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, which includes a joint foreword by US Senators John McCain and Max Cleland. Shay speaks frequently at the invitation of US and allied forces and has held a number of consultative and teaching posts, such as the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study (1999–2000), Chair of Ethics, Leadership and Personnel Policy in the Office of the US Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel (2004–2005), and the 2009 Omar Bradley Chair of Strategic