The wars went hot in October of 2001. Their consequences were brutally evident in traumatized U.S. (Afghanistan and Iraq) veterans’ growing problems with substance abuse, depression, domestic violence, suicide, homelessness and violent crime. A depressed economy fueling layoffs, hiring freezes, high unemployment compounded anxieties among people generally, among veterans poignantly.
Over here
“Deep in America’s heartland is a small town a world away from the heat of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan,” Nick Carey leads a Reuters article in early November. In Forest City, Iowa, as with communities across the United States, families battle the legacy of both conflicts.
Twenty-seven-year old Steven Jordal served two tours in Iraq and returned to the States suffering “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by multiple blast waves from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rockets and mortars.” He sees spots, hears with a hearing device, and is currently incapable of supporting himself.
His younger brother, David Jordal, served in Afghanistan and returned with “anger issues” and has “trouble holding down a job.” His wife left. His five-year-old daughter lives with grandparents and is unclear about who her “parents” are.
Rhonda Jordal says of the son who lives with her, she can deal with most of the fallout of her son’s two tours in Iraq — his daily headaches and his irritability, 635 days to get him out of jail in Oklahoma City, the mountain of debt faced by the family because of legal fees. What breaks her heart is her son’s refusal to let her hug him as he did before going to war. “‘I know now,’ she said, ‘he’s never really coming back.’”
Endless consequences
“More than nine years of war in Afghanistan, seven in Iraq have cost the United States nearly 5,800 lives lost in combat,” Carey writes in the Reuters article. Close to 40,000 soldiers are suffering wounds from this war. The nation together with its loss of people and their potential has lost more than a trillion dollars. Moreover, even if the U.S. government starts withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 (the stated goal of the current president who embraced conflicts begun by the previous president) — “the human cost is huge … the impact of the wars will last generations.”
Over there and back again, Ann Jones writes,
“War Is Not Over When It’s Over” —
“In 2007, running out of money, Ahmad [who had been jailed and suffered torture] went to Lebanon. He had been told that he might find highly paid work in Beirut, but he didn’t. Penniless and lonely in November [of that year], he sent for his wife and son. The family registered with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and asked to be resettled in another country. Referred to the United States, they were interviewed by U.S. embassy officials. They wait for a decision in a windowless one-room apartment that reminds Ahmad of prison. Fear of being detained and deported by the authorities keeps him confined to that room.
“He suffers depression, anxiety, flashbacks; and he beats his wife as he was beaten. He was tortured. He tortures her. (‘Domestic violence’ is the euphemism we use to name torture that takes place in the home, but a comparison of standard techniques — from stripping and sleep deprivation to beating, burning, bondage, asphyxiation, and sexual assault — shows that torture by another name is still torture.) Slowly, with the help of psychotherapists at Restart, a [UN High Commissioner for Refugees]-funded program for survivors of torture, Ahmad is learning to stop abusing [his wife] Azhar…“In the violence of war, children are orphaned, maimed, mutilated, sexually assaulted, kidnapped, forced to be soldiers or servants or sex slaves, tortured, and murdered. Children who survive the violence of war may be deeply wounded, robbed of childhood, and poised to enter adult life already crippled beyond repair. Even children who know war only at secondhand — the children of soldiers returning from far-off lands — may be bent.
“Any of these damaged children may inflict the harm done to them upon others, even when it breaks their hearts.
“Think of wars of recent memory and those still going on in the world today. Think of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Burma. Think of Darfur, South Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone. Think of Sri Lanka, Kashmir, East Timor, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea. Think of Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Georgia, Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia.
“Think especially of the United States, which has been at war, overtly or covertly, some place (or many places) in the world almost continuously since 1941… Even when a conflict officially ends, violence against women continues and often grows worse.
“Murderous aggression is not turned off overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be convenient targets. Opposing factions of men sit down together to negotiate a peace settlement — without ever letting up on rape, abduction, mutilation, and murder of women and girls.
“Whenever soldiers rape during war, rape becomes a habit taken up by civilian men and carried seamlessly from wartime into the troubled ‘post-conflict’ time beyond, which is labeled ‘peace.’…
“I’m trying to suggest,” Ann Jones writes, “that war is not what we think it is, when we hear all these reports about soldiers and generals and strategies. War includes the whole population. War is fought on civilian ground and in all modern wars civilians are the primary casualties of war, much more so than soldiers are. If you look at [today’s demographics worldwide], we are short 60 million women who have been killed and lost in war. We ignore this completely.…”
Sources and notes
“Special report: For U.S. veterans, the war after the wars,” November 9, 2010,
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A82L620101109
“Introduction ‘War Is Not Healthy’ to Ann Jones’ War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women and the Unseen Consequences of Conflict, http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org/content/view/2484/59/
Also “Ann Jones on ‘War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women and the Unseen Consequences of Conflict’, Democracy Now interview, October 1, 2010, at Truth-out, http://www.truth-out.org/ann-jones-war-is-not-over-when-its-over-women-and-unseen-consequences-conflict63775
Ann Jones is a writer and photographer and author of seven other books including Kabul in Winter, Women Who Kill, and Next Time She’ll Be Dead. Jones has participated in congressional committees on the status of women in Afghanistan and briefed the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations on the subject. Her work has appeared in numerous periodical publications.
In 2007, the International Rescue Committee, which brings emergency relief to countries in the wake of war, sought to understand what women in post-conflict zones really needed, wanted, and feared. Answers came through the point and click of a digital camera. On behalf of the IRC, Ann Jones spent a year traveling through Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East, giving cameras to women who had no other means of telling the world what war had done to their lives.
_________________________________________
Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]
No comments:
Post a Comment