My Comments on: Roderick T. Long, Army Dreamers, HNN Liberty and Power [pseudonym], Apr. 17, 2008

RE: http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/49497.html#comment

The Return of Shell Shock from The First World War to Iraq.

The present military situation in the Middle East is somewhat unprecedented, in that the United States is trying to fight a land war with an aging, affluent population, which has no surplus sons, and no large-scale hazardous occupations (*), and at the same time, it is attempting to do this without conscription. The result is that the whole load gets piled onto a comparatively small number of men who happened to be already enlisted in the Army or Marine Corps. The Air Force and Navy lost little time in protecting their own manpower supplies by giving early discharges to young men whom they might otherwise have been expected to make into naval infantry, after the manner of the German Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe divisions during the Second World War. If comparatively few troops are in-theater at any given time, that simply means that they get worked more intensely. Many of the noncombat jobs which might have provided a safety valve get assigned to contractors, who can be anything from Philippino guest workers to South African mercenaries. The contractors have not signed enlistment papers, and are of course free to leave. But in another sense, the situation is not unprecedented-- It is simply a return to the British and French experience in the First World War.

(*) It used to be that underground coal miners proverbially made the best soldiers, because they were occupationally fearless. Very few things were as bad as the mine.

The First World War set new records for length and continuousness of combat. All kinds of new issues emerged. One was the concept of "Shell-Shock." Shell Shock was invented as a diagnostic category to describe men who had had a near miss from a shell near their dug-outs, and had thereafter begun displaying mental symptoms, ie. fearfulness. Shell shock was viewed as a kind of concussion, and therefore did not imply any moral disapprobation. The original concept of shell shock in the British army during the First World War has to be understood in terms of an environment in which 1) the likelihood of ultimately surviving combat was approaching vanishing point, 2) troops were systematically maiming themselves in order to become eligible for discharge, and were sometimes punished for it, 3) some troops were progressing to more desperate measures, such as mass desertion and mutiny, and 4) the authorities were systematically standing runaways up in front of firing squads in an attempt to keep the troops from all deciding to go home. Naturally, under the circumstances, objections to this had to be couched in terms of organic injury. Nothing less would have sufficed under the circumstances: in fact, it had to be considerably graver than, for example, having one's trigger finger shot off. The injury had to be seen as one which could easily have been lethal. Blast-induced concussion met these requirements. A certain plausibility was added by the fact that there had been cases of men being killed by blast alone-- their dugouts protected them against everything except explosive shock waves (see Moore, pp. 73, 81, 89, 92, 100, 103, 132, 152, 163).

American participation in the First World War was very late. For all practical purposes the United States did not have a land army in 1917. What the United States had, was a constabulary for fighting Indians, Mexican bandits, etc. It took the better part of a year to put an army together. The first significant American forces commenced operations in France at the end of May, 1918, and the expeditionary force only reached full strength in August-September. The effective duration of the American First World War was therefore only three to five months (McDonald, esp. pp. 390-400). General Pershing simply did not have to confront the issues of morale and combat fatigue which were being faced by the British Field Marshal Haig and the French Marshal Petain, whose troops were wearied by four years of war, issues which would eventually be faced by General Eisenhower to a limited degree, and General Westmoreland to a greater degree.

The United States strategy in the Second World War was essentially a naval one. Thus, the Army strategy was, perforce, essentially an amphibious one. It involved accumulating masses of men in a safe area, and then putting them ashore somewhere to win a decisive battle in a short period of time. By preference, the amphibious landing was placed astride the enemy lines of communication, with a view to forcing the enemy to retreat tens or hundred of miles in a very short period of time. The same objective was pursued with armored breakthroughs, albeit with lesser success. When enemy resistance developed, the customary solution was not to fling troops at the front line over and over again, but to launch a new amphibious assault. It was only very late in the war, when the Axis had retreated into a small space, that combat became anything like continuous. Under these circumstances, keeping up with the battle required a positive degree of initiative on the part of most of the pursuing troops. One example which comes to mind would be the British Airborne troops who stole a road steamroller and used it as an improvised personal jeep on their way across Germany (Gregory, p. 148). Eddie Slovik, later shot for cowardice, arrived in France in August 1944, and avoided combat until October, not by any actual act of desertion, but simply by failing to exercise initiative in catching up with the battle front, and by making himself useful to a line-of-communication unit. His companion during this period was a man named John Tankey, who fought for a month before being wounded, spent several months in hospital, missing the rest of the war in Europe, and then went home to Detroit to become an ordinary factory worker, in an automobile factory, doing one of the most physically demanding jobs which existed in American industry (Huie, pp. 120-40). The periods when fighting was obligatory were comparatively short. Most troops were out of battle before they became due for a breakdown. The idea of Shell Shock was superseded by more psychiatric categories for the exceptions, categories which of course did have at least a covert pejorative aspect.

In 1945, the Army instituted a system of "points" as an equitable means of determining who would be sent home first. In the Korean war, this system evolved into a system of individual rotation (Fehrenbach, pp. 536-38). The notion of individual rotation became explicit in Vietnam. The whole system was upheld by conscription, the draft. The individual soldier knew that once he had done his fair share, someone else would be drafted to take his place. Even so, morale suffered a bit.

In Vietnam, there was a comparatively low rate of diagnosed combat neurosis. This was, as as much as anything, an indication of the way the military authorities chose to deal with men who could not or would not fight. Such troops were permitted to transfer (subject to milder or harsher conditions respecting extension of tour and service) to the units manning the defensive perimeters of large bases. Since these lines were fixed, even a modicum of labor would insure the rapid improvement of their fortifications to the point that they became what Anthony Herbert disdainfully referred to as '22 caliber Maginot lines.' (Herbert, p. 128) At the same time, these lines were comparatively unlikely to come under intensive attack, except for the special cases of Khe Sanh and the Tet offensive. The Viet Cong simply did not have the resources to attack fixed positions without expending entire regiments, and this they could not do very often. At this stage, automobiles were simply too much of an expensive American luxury good for car bombs to be feasible. According to Herbert, who was contemptuous of the defensive lines' occupants' utter lack of discipline, slovenliness, etc., the troops occupying them were largely just left alone, allowed to do more or less as they pleased. That was probably good from a therapeutic standpoint. By contrast, recognition of psychiatric symptoms was deliberately made hard to get, in the interests of maintaining morale, since it would have implied early evacuation and honorable discharge for the lucky sufferer. In the nature of things, this meant that a high proportion of the psychiatric cases that cropped up involved someone so disturbed as to be a candidate for involuntary commitment. For example, the navy doctor John Parish cites a case of a disturbed young marine who arrived in Parrish's MASH unit, babbling out his feelings of love and hate for his gunnery sergeant. It subsequently transpired that he had shot the sergeant (in the head, which would presumably be fatal). Naturally that meant that his emotional problems had to be taken seriously (Parrish, pp. 136-38). The military lawyer John Stevens Berry cites a similar case, in which a soldier, partly drunk, and partly in a disassociated paranoiac episode, fragged his best friend. Berry got the man acquitted, by appealing to the pity of the court-martial members, and persuading them to deal with the episode as an accident (Berry, pp.14-18). By contrast, Goldman and Fuller offer the account of a soldier, who, getting crazier and crazier, and unable to convince anyone that he was not malingering, ended up accepting a transfer in exchange for an extension of his enlistment. He deserted shortly after returning to the United States, and this, of course, brought the disciplinary machinery into play (Goldman, 76-78, 183-90). In effect, the army's policy tended to define battle neurosis cases first as cowardice (considered as a venial rather than a mortal sin), and later, if it persisted outside of combat, as bad conduct.

Psychiatric and quasi-psychiatric issues emerged afterwards, when Vietnam Veterans began to experience social problems (Post-Traumatic Stress) or assorted health problems (Agent Orange). The latter, in particular, are hard to separate from the normal experience of aging men. (see Scott). Desert Storm was about as short and sweet as a war could be. However, it yielded comparable cases involving exposure to depleted uranium, a toxic metal used in anti-tank rounds.

Now we come to the present war. It was supposed to be over in a few weeks, yet by now, practically every soldier in the army, who is not either a trainee or already serving in the Middle East, has spent at least a year in Iraq or Afghanistan, and some have spent more, with no end in sight. Increasing the size of the army is no solution, unless one can find additional recruits to staff out this larger army. However, conscription is just not politically feasible. There is no strictly American precedent since the Civil War, but the British and French experience in the First World War is the closest existing analogy.Over the last year or so, it has become apparent that Shell Shock has returned. The forms are eerily familiar, as is the shape of the ensuing political controversy. Nothing much has been said, which was not said in 1916-1918, during the "War to End All Wars."

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Bibliography:

John Stevens Barry, Those Gallant Men: On Trial in Vietnam, Presidio Press, Novato, Calif., 1984. Memoir of a JAG officer, covering the full range of cases he defended or prosecuted in Vietnam.

Goldman, Peter, and Tony Fuller, Charlie Company: What Vietnam did to Us, Ballantine Books, New York, 1984, orig. pub. 1983

Herbert, Anthony B. (Lt. Col Ret.) with James T. Wooten, Soldier, 1973, (paperback edition, Dell Publishing co., Inc, New York, 1973).

Parrish, John A., M. D., 12, 20 & 5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam, Penguin Books, Inc., Baltimore, 1973, orig. pub. 1972.

Charles B. McDonald, chapters 17 & 18 ("World War I: The First Three Years" and "World War I: The US Army Overseas"), in Maurice Matloff, ed., American Military History, Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D.C., 1969.

William Moore, _The Thin Yellow Line_, 1974 (Wordsworth Edition, 1999).

William Bradford Huie, The Execution of Private Slovik, 1954, 1970 (Dell paperback edition, 1971, New York).

Barry Gregory, British Airborne Troops, 1940-45, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1974

T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: Korea: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963, (Pocket Books [Cardinal] paperback edition, 1964, New York).

Wilbur J. Scott, PTSD and Agent Orange: Implications for a Sociology of Veterans' Issues, Armed Forces & Society, Summer 1992.

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Web Sources Relating to the Current Episode.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-03-brain-injury-tests_N.htm

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_05/011254.php

http://www.intel-dump.com/posts/1178318983.shtml

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0508/p99s01-duts.html

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37732
http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20070517/why_does_the_white_house_oppose

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_04/013551.php
http://bluegirlredmissouri.blogspot.com/2008/04/human-beings-have-limits.html

(04/19/2008 12:52 PM)

[In response to a question about enlistments expiring, or being extended, I added:]