Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Decommissioning and Crime

The United States government is able to maintain itself in three wars at the same time because the armed forces are entirely volunteer. The majority of people only become involved in the wars by paying outrageous taxes to support those wars. None of our current wars have been approved by the people are been as a resolution declaring war even though they are against sovereign states. Thus, each of the current wars are illegal under international law and immoral from the standpoint of the commandment against murder. We train young, mostly poor, troubled people to fight in these wars. We make them into deadly warriors. We use euphemisms of targets, enemy combatants, insurgents instead of calling them people. We teach these people how to kill without mercy and without mental reservation. We have seen how these people sometimes forget that they are suppose to be helping the citizens of these other countries to be free of bad political leaders and we substitute crazed warriors for the previous strongmen of the dictator. 

When these same people come home, it has been estimated that 30% suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. Put correctly, this illness is a direct result of the rewiring that the brain goes through in the combat situation where the person perceives any threat and reacts with deadly force. These people go through no process of rewiring their brains. They are still functioning in an heightened states of alertness and paranoia. Threats perceived at home are not treated by the brain any differently than those threats were treated in the combat situation. Thus, the failure to decommission this warrior and return him to civilian life causes many to break and some to commit violent crime. They self medicate and fall deeper into depression from which many never recover. As many as 20% of Vietnam veterans, who participated in a similar war, eventually spent time in jail. 

There should be new ways of dealing with these people. When a person returns from a combat zone and returns to civilian life, they should go through a six week training course to help them care about people again, to help them learn to exercise civil control of their emotions, to help them alleviate the effects of war induced paranoia, and to identify those who need more serious psychological help. Persons who begin to show danger signs like DUI arrests, drug arrests, petty criminality, and domestic violence should be shunted into programs to deal with their underlying pain and suffering. They should get psychological care rather than incarceration. Persons who commit murder as an estimated 1,000 have done who had PTSD should be incarcerated in mental institutions specializing in deprogramming veterans. We should be willing to pay as much to decommission a soldier as we did to train him for war.