Iraq Did Not Create the Fort Hood Shooter

There is an increasingly troubling narrative that essentially argues that service in Iraq and Afghanistan explains the criminal behavior at Fort Hood. This is an over simplification of most veterans with PTSD who will never commit a crime, but moreover a profound misunderstanding of the nature of counterinsurgency in Iraq. By doctrine we were deescalators of violence not perpetuators and we most often recognized that our best weapons "did not shoot." Any Iraq or Afghanistan veteran will tell you, if you take a couple of minutes to talk to them from time to time, that most tense situations in combat were dangerous situations caused by unidentified enemies and US forces refrained engagement because of a lack of positive identification. Units that departed from this course committed crimes, and were the exception.

The most tense moment for me occurred in just this way, and I have been hesitant to publicly discuss the night of my worst concussion because the situation got heated and there was some understandable personal tensions going on, though only momentary, and that I may seem like I am criticizing other people. That is not the case, I am going to describe an awful situation when everyone had the right intentions, and calmer heads prevailed. This will emphasize my roll because of the limits of my own memory, but I will assure that just as many or more times other soldiers, non commissioned officers of superiors played similar roles. You might assume the situation to be exceptional, but I think that day gets to the marrow of the US Army's, at company level, propensity to deescalate violence rather than perpetuate it in Iraq. The argument that we are more violent is a profound misunderstanding of what we did in Iraq, and more often we chose non violence. Anyone using our war as an excuse is exploiting a popular idea base on very little material evidence.

My worst of moment of Iraq was after a suicide bombing, but the second worse occurred after and IED blew up and convoy of Bradley's while my platoon was set in over-watch to prevent just such an attack. I have not now, nor will I ever feel like a greater failure, than watching a piece of dirt that I had personally been observing for six hours with multiple soldiers pulling rotations blow up right in front of me. In the moment I could not even see it. The force of the blast was faster than my brain's ability to process the image and I was thrown down a stairwell by over pressure. I fell face down and I came to face up, as if it were glitch in the matrix. It could not have been a second but I lost some consciousness. I was dizzy, very confused, but a Lieutenant with eyes on IED. The platoon of Bradley's was from another battalion passing through our area so they had no idea that Americans were occupying our building and mechanized and airborne units use different night optics. Concussed or not we could all die if we did not immediately mark our position in every way possible. Their fire discipline saved our lives, but we we would be tested the same way very quickly.

Local Iraqi Army or Policemen ran to to occupy a road block to the north of the attack, but their winter cloths made them hard to identify. Balaclavas and no helmets made friendly force identification nearly impossible, and created very tense moment with a few of my soldiers fearing an insurgent attack. Simultaneously on my radio, my company commander was very unhappy that bomb blew up right in may face. Why wouldn't he be. I certainly was not happy about it and to this day I second guess myself about that night. So while dealing with dizziness, disorientation and terrible situation I was simultaneously getting my ass chewed and preventing soldiers who wanted to fire on what they thought was a very legitimate threat to our security. These soldier were woken from sleep by bomb less that 50 meters away, so anger was par for the course, but the enemy did not usually sit in the middle of the street and gaggle up like Iraq soldiers so I wanted to take the time for confirmation. Everyone was angry from the lowest private to the battalion commander and tempers were hotter than they should have been on the radio, mine included. Not hotter than human beings woken up by a bomb at 4 AM though. However, despite all of anger and frustration everyone's actions were exemplary. My soldiers wanted to fire, but headed orders, I kept command and control until my platoon sergeant got on top of things and until a my commander was on the ground. After they were on top of it I actually put microphone up because I was getting really loopy and having trouble grasping the basic geographic layout.

People say that no one trains you for days like that, but the truth is I was trained precisely for days like that. My service in Iraq was more often events when I was attacked and had no clear enemy to engage so I waited for better opportunity rather than risking the lives of innocent people. So I cannot by any stretch of the imagination understand how Iraq, and the war I fought could be a source of anything, but level headed others centered decision making under the most adverse, frustrating and enraging situations. Frankly I am sick and tired of being compared to criminals because I have PTSD from all the days that I made the emotionally draining, but the ultimately least violent decisions only to be characterized as some non thinking killer with no human agency or power over my situation in Iraq and its aftermath. I was then and I am now, like the vast majority of other veterans, making the best of a far from ideal situation, and I am beyond frustrated that every-time another mass murder happens all people with mental illnesses are lumped together with an incredible minority of violent criminals. Especially in the wake of war of occupation and counterinsurgency that stressed nonviolent outcomes whenever they could be attained.

Hombrewing as Creative Expression and a Seemingly Counter-intuitive, but Effective Check to Alcoholism

Like most people who come home after deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan I have struggled with alcoholism in the past. By a complete accident I have stumbled onto a great mechanism to develop a healthy relationship with alcohol. My roommate and I took a trip to Germany with a fresh round of deployment money and it opened my eyes to beer culture. I had already begun an obsession with Microbrew beer because of Ranger School. The best day of Ranger school is the party at the Gator lounge at the close of all training. I figured if we were limited to two beers than I would drink expensive stuff. Before Ranger school I disliked beer, but I began to really get drawn into the microbrew scene.

My wife noticed my love of microbrew beer and quickly bought me a homebrew kit for Christmas. When I started brewing I developed a much more nuanced and complicated appreciation to the subtleties of flavor and ingredients in beer.

To say it simply good beer tastes good and that leads you to drink more slowly in order to better appreciate it. Great beer is even better. By developing a greater affinity for the process of brewing and all of the differing factors that lead to a great beer, I began to start having more control over the temptation to numb my senses with alcohol. I also began studying home brewing and reading the books written my microbrewers. I came to realize how the rise of light beer increased binge drinking and that the growing microbrew movement regularly spoke out about alcoholism. Only an idiot would waste a great beer shotgunning chugging or funneling it.

Avoiding drinking altogether is a hard pill to swallow for some, but anyone can come to appreciate drinking good beer. Brewing helps one develop a healthy attitude about alcohol.  Microbrew beer more expensive and it is harder to afford binge drinking it. For me home brewing has also served a means of creative expression that seems to balance me out a lot and overtime I began to realize that I needed more direct outlets, like this blog.

As a historian I used the analytical side of brain a lot and brewing helps me flex my creative muscles. I am often at loss because grade school did very little “boy or culturally masculine art” and I think this is a problem. For soldiers it is hard to express our feelings. As a historian I think the rise of masculine brewing culture is funny because in Early America women dominated the brewing of homebrew. I might be a feminist, but I can ultimately never escape a lifetime of bombardment by ideas as to what constitutes toughness and manhood. Military training has conditioned us to suppress emotion so hobbies that help us express ourselves are very useful for our return home.

Home brewing is a way to express ourselves in a way that respects our sense of toughness within a masculine cultural ideals. Better it should help us develop an appreciation for alcohol and not an obsession with drunkenness. It is also a hobby that is cost effective (I dare you to try and find another one) and one that you can spend a lifetime getting better at. You can easily brew beer that would cost $3 a bottle in batches of 48 bottles costing a total of $60 (this averages $1.25 per bottle), so after three batches you cover the initial investment.

Every batch of beer I have brewed in the last four years has employed a new technique. Today I am trying a special chemical that eliminates gluten without forcing you to use the awful sorghum syrup. Brewing makes you realize that beer is a living and breathing thing. This fosters a sense of creation and an appreciation for life when I brew it. Its a hobby too, so in the past I have been extremely meticulous, but today I brewed during a busy time, so I just threw things together from memory without measuring anything and trusted my instincts. Like anything else, it has taken me years to be able to just throw things together intuitively so I wouldn't recommend that early on.

This certainly would not help us all, and I would discourage this for people with addictive personalities, but it is something I have come to really value. Anything that helps you come to terms with the problems of alcoholism or any hobby that helps make you a better person is useful. I just thought I would share my affinity for brewing and how this unlikely hobby has helped me check the impulse to numb my senses with alcoholism in the hopes that it might help others find new muses or face their own problems.

The OIF/OEF Cocktail: Shell Shock or mTBI and PTSD

I am often frustrated when people mistake mTBI and PTSD because they can be so different. Admittedly PTSD is the hardest thing I face from day to day, but that is because of mTBI. Anatomically speaking PTSD is the over stimulation or use of the Hypothalmic Pituitary Adrenal (HPA) Axis. There is no simple way to describe neurology, but I will do my best at explaining my experiences in relation to my limited understanding of brain anatomy. The HPA is a apart of the limbic system which is one of the oldest traits in the human body. Our dogs and horses are some of the best aids to PTSD because we share this structure even if our cortex functioning is very different. The HPA and limbic system creates a stress response by emitting the chemical cortisol (often called adrenaline) which gives you energy (anger), pulls the blood out of your extremities in preference to organs (you will simply feel tingling or numbness in your limbs), and activates a larger part of your brain making you hyperaware. Think of the golden hour a casualty has to get into surgery, and to get fresh blood and coagulants before they start to crash. That is the final aspect of the limbic system's response to stress: the crash that inevitably comes after your body works at such high levels. That feeling of extreme fatigue and the inability to sleep is a direct result of cortisol, and also why battle fatigue was one of the first terms for PTSD.

PTSD is the persistence of this complex stress response into non dangerous situations. This interplay works with the cortex because the limbic system will provide the stressors to your consciousness so that you can more quickly respond to similar situations in the future. The HPA cortex relationship is a two way loop that can be instinctually triggered, by the older limbic system or by the cortex's memory of previously stressful events. I can see the way that anatomy and social construction works together in my memory of soldiers saying that sooner or later we are going to jump when a car back fires just like all these other guys, already favoring the stress responses of previous groups of veterans through a learned behavior, as well as reflexive reactions to triggers common to the tactics of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was blown up in a stairwell so I hyperventilate in stairwells to this day. The anatomy of stress, the events themselves and the way that others have responded socially all effect the way we experience danger as well as the way we choose to process our memory.

But this is a post about mTBI and PTSD. How does this matter?

mTBI is actually a lot less complicated neurological than PTSD, though the experience is incredibly complicated, the concussive nature of high explosives as well as hitting ones head generally damages the brain and most effects the frontal cortex. The brain's protective coating is damaged by concussion and the cortex gets slammed into your skull. This generally erodes your whole brain functioning, but has one set of symptoms that makes PTSD a lot harder to manage. Cortex injuries limit a person's impulse control, and when a person has been exposed to serious life or death situations they are more likely to have a cortex that always fires up the limbic system's response to any stressor. Hence why for me the graduate seminar table and public speaking will often trigger panic attacks. Also the anger I felt in battle is worse because my cortex is not as capable as it was prior to concussions or repeated exposures to explosions. Everything is worse because you have eroded impulse control and every part yourb rain as a system is not your own. Your body is literally not yours to control. The WWI and WWII crack ups were not solely PTSD, but also damage to the cortex from shelling, because as Jonathan Shay as observed, PTSD is actually useful in combat. You always want to fight or fly, but you fight better as a unit so your trained to stick to the plan, that is until blasts and concussions add to this mix and make it harder to control the stress impulse.

You crash because we are only designed to go that hard in brief instances: the golden hour. You become depressed because you are exceeding the capability of human anatomy, and because you are losing control of your impulses. Worse cortisol damages the conscious memory when it is overused and the center of your brain that is self aware is consistently damaged. Kurt Vonnegut referred to scouts, himself included, as people that were controlled by their spinal column, shared location with the limbic system, because he understood the human brain in a profoundly human and intellectual fashion, but when the cortex is damaged it is nearly impossible to stop this life or death impulsivity.

I can remember my first nightmare and flashback like it was yesterday. I had just shot an RPG gunner in Mosul, I had a flashback that day and a nightmare that night. I knew it was PTS and I didn't care, I managed it and was upfront with the Physician Assistant about it. It was war, of course it was going to be terrible, but it was important for me to continue to do my part. However, when I got a concussion I could no longer see what was going on as natural and I got way to stuck in my limbic system. Everything was extreme and everything remains life or death because no matter how smart I can make myself my cortex doesn't have the impulse control that I once had. I can know something, but not feel something, because the emotional stress response is more powerful than my ability to control that impulse. I perform amazing feats because I am running on an extreme and then I crash because I am going way to hard all the time. I know this, but it is almost impossible to control the powerful impulse. I just hope I never lose the ultimate battle to the natural and constant ups and downs that come with the OIF/OEF cocktail.