PTSD and The New York Times Disorder

In a 9 page article featured by the New York Times as a weekend special, many sad and harrowing stories are told of American service members who have been charged or convicted of murder after returning from combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some have killed girlfriends or spouses after losing a temper in an argument, some were themselves victims of a crime but reacted to it in a manner understandable in combat, but illegal here at home. The authors claim that "taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak." and the conclusion implied page after page is that those returning from combat are broken, terribly violent, and amount to a list of reasons why we should be against war for any reason. Let me state for the record, that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is an under-reported, and under-treated aspect of combat that causes difficulties for returning veterans and their families that can scarcely be understood by those who have never experienced them. I do not in any way wish to belittle the challenges faced by soldiers readjusting to civilian life, however I do wish to examine the explicit and implicit allegations made in the Times' article and statistically examine whether those returning from combat are truly more violent than they would otherwise be expected to be.

Every page of the article talks about "the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence", about how war "unleash[es] certain things in a human being we don’t allow in civic society", " tales [of] warriors plagued by psychic wounds ", tales of soldiers who "wanted to be the first one to get a kill". Like many articles in today's mass media, it is ostensibly about something important and unbiased; in this case the article purports to be about the link between PTSD and violence. But after reading nine pages of example after example, the true thesis becomes clear: you should be against the Iraq war because all the soldiers are coming home with PTSD and killing people.

Nowhere in the article will you find any analysis of the statistics to determine whether veterans are more violent than other groups of people, or even the general population. PTSD is a serious problem, and one that needs to be addressed better by the military medical establishment, but demonizing the soldiers as blood thirsty savages which cannot control their urge to kill after combat does nothing to achieve that goal. While I can personally offer nothing to those coping with PTSD, I can set the record straight.

The Times found 121 cases of former soldiers accused or convicted of murder, to err on the side of caution the first assumption I will make for this analysis is that all those accused are guilty. There are 1.4 million Americans who have answered the call of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Due to the asymmetrical nature of combat in this theater, there are no traditional front lines. Many units that were never meant for combat found themselves facing the enemy in the course of their non-combat duties. For this reason, the threat of combat was ever present for many soldiers, whether they were ever involved in a fire fight or not, and IED's have taken many of our forces who were never involved in the front lines action. As the New York Times did not limit itself to those who had been in combat for its article, I shall not limit this analysis in such a fashion either.

Let us begin broadly by simply doing the arithmetic to see the the murder rate in the terms commonly expressed when examining a US city. This results in a murder rate for returning soldiers of 8.64 per 100,000. To put that into context, you are 530% safer with soldiers than you are in Washington DC, 486% safer than in Detroit, 443% safer than in Baltimore, 285% safer than in Memphis, and 222% safer than in Chicago. In fact, using 2002 numbers (note: all percentages calculated using 2002), if we treat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as the 51st state, they would be ranked as the 11th safest state in the country!

Yet I will argue that this is as yet an incomplete picture. The average age of the US army is 28 years old, which is likely skewed by the aging army brass by a year or two. Never the less, the average age of a murderer in the US is 27 years old. What this means is that due to statistical differences in murder rates, the randomly selected veteran is more likely to be in a "high murder" age demographic than the randomly selected inhabitant of Washington DC, Detroit, Baltimore and so on. If that wasn't bad enough, combat veterans tend to be overwhelmingly male, because that's who the military puts into combat. Murderer's also tend to be overwhelmingly male. So if you take the randomly selected veteran, and the randomly selected US citizen, the vet is significantly more likely to be of the exact demographic which represents the highest numbers of murders than the US citizen, and yet the veterans can be thought of as the 11th safest state!

Where is the "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak"? Where is the endemic killing and murder? Where is the outrage at those in the media who consistently portray those who have endured combat in the name of our country for the sake of our security at home in such a disgraceful manner? People tend to form strong opinions based on weak evidence and exceptions to the rule rather than investigate it for themselves. The media play into this in order to push their agenda by highlighting the few specks of evidence they can marshal in support of their opinion while ignoring the ocean of evidence to the contrary. Those who faced the battle fields of foreign wars must continue their fight once back home to re-assimilate themselves into civilian life, and theirs is a challenge we must embrace as a nation; not vilify as the bane of the nation if we are discontented with our government's foreign policy.

"I am only one of many who sleep beneath the blanket of freedom won for me by men greater than I will ever be, one who lives under the liberty paid for by the blood of heroes and patriots, one who has never been asked to make any substantive sacrifice on behalf of his country." -Boge Quinn